Before He Thought He Died (2023), a friend spoke on his misgivings about 88:88 (2016), Isaiah Medina’s hitherto best-known film, echoing sentiments that sounded familiar.…
The late Chinese, Tibetan minority filmmaker Pema Tseden is no stranger to the Western international film festival circuit (which is also the case for many…
Set in a small Balkan town still reeling from a tragic factory fire several years earlier, Mladen Djordjevic’s Working Class Goes to Hell finds a…
Sometimes people die for no reason, and that a tragedy can be so banal makes it all the more incomprehensible. This is what the immigrant…
Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros For most of Frederick Wiseman’s career, the master documentarian has focused on the lives and institutions of the United States. His films…
Looking over the 25 years’ worth of productions by French-Canadian auteur Denis Côté, one discerns a kind of creative restlessness. Not only is Côté a…
Already an acclaimed editor on films such as Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light & Post Tenebras Lux and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, as well as an actress…
Following the success and acclaim of his reality-bending 1997 directorial debut Perfect Blue — a feverish take on the Giallo genre, filtered through a ’90s…
Director Kiohara Yui’s last feature, Our House — which debuted in 2017, and which this writer briefly reviewed here at InRO when it played the…
Back in 2006, five years after 9/11, the question of when enough time had passed for Hollywood to grapple with a national tragedy was a…
Les Indésirables “The real problem [or] the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is…
“The real problem [or] the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the…
There’s a recurring motif in Cassandro where Gael García Bernal’s character, an openly gay luchador, works an outwardly hostile crowd from inside the ring; weathering…
Consistently divisive and successfully provocative, Sebastián Silva had existed in a seemingly charmed space — relative to that of the average, contemporary independent filmmaker —…
When Kenneth Branagh last donned Hercule Poirot’s trademark mustache, the famous detective was chugging down the Nile River on a private cruise ship brimming with…
Whew! It’s only September, but here at InRO it does feel like we’ve lived through at least two of ’em, having successfully trawled through Cannes, Tribeca,…
At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to the ultra-wealthy…
Romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding was released into a handful of theaters in the spring of 2002 and became a word-of-mouth sleeper, eventually…
The Palace At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to…
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s The…