Any discussion of Phoenix almost begs to begin with the ending. One of the greatest mic-drop endings in all but the most literal sense, it…
In retrospect, it almost seems odd that Christian Petzold’s international breakthrough effectively came with Barbara. Though it was his first period film, dealing with a…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as…
Jerichow isn’t really an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, at least not any more than Transit is an adaptation of Casablanca or Undine…
The liminal sensibilities of Christian Petzold’s films accord their material spaces an air of contradiction: the gleaming surfaces of steel walls and glass doors exude…
Over the course of his decades-long career, Christian Petzold has come to shape something like a cinema of failure; potently and precisely carving itself from…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only…
Following his breakthrough film, The State I Am In, Christian Petzold returned to smaller-scale television production for his next project, 2001’s Something to Remind Me.…
The State I Am In, Christian Petzold’s theatrical feature debut, begins with a song. Opening on a profile shot of its central character, Jeanne (Julia…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing his…
"Harun [Farocki] told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, [Night and Fog] was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents. They understood that the German state, even the modern German state, was based on
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There’s a willful naivete many cinephiles employ when attempting to wax poetics about “the theater-going experience,” one that blatantly ignores sociopolitical and economic dimensions in…
It has become increasingly evident that 2009 was a major turning point in Tsai Ming-liang’s artistic development: Madame Butterfly marked his first, decisive shift to…
In considering the artistic decay posed within the persisting practice of archetypal expository documentary, Your Face represents a confrontation with history and convention, here mapped…
Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng have one of the strangest relationships in movies. For dedicated Tsai (and Lee) fans, that goes almost without saying. From…
The Journey to the West was perhaps the defining story of Chinese language film in the 2010s. Like stories of the Shaolin Temple or folk…
Were one to walk the streets of Taipei, ride its elevated MRT lines, and pass by the imposing structure of the Taipei 101 and the…
In 2013, around the time that Stray Dogs had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Tsai Ming-liang announced his retirement from filmmaking. In…
It’s perhaps presumptuous, a little reductive even, to speak of an artist’s filmography as movements or periods, particularly when they are still making new, vital…
Considering the breadth and consistency of Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography, it’s initially hard to regard the short Madame Butterfly as much more than a curious aberration.…
Given his relative renown amongst a certain type of adventurous, festival-savvy cinephile, interviews with Tsai Ming-liang tend to focus on either the ‘slowness’ of his…