As of the publication of this review, there are 119 Letterboxd reviews logged for Chloe Abrahams’ debut feature The Taste of Mango. In one capsule from June 2023, the author avoids synopsis and goes straight for the jugular, writing: “this story is too important for it to be…
“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate,” says a seemingly omniscient and distractingly didactic female narrator as the camera closes up on our protagonist, Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett),…
Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s Gaucho Gaucho is a mesmerizing study of form and image-making, a film as preoccupied with its subjects as it is with the act of capturing them. Gaucho Gaucho premiered at Sundance in 2024, and follows in the footsteps of the pair’s celebrated The…
Arriving at the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia this year, I found myself witness to a brewing controversy. Deaf Lovers, a new film about two star crossed lovers — one Ukrainian and one Russian — had managed to uniquely piss off both pro-Ukrainian groups and had…
Way back in 2000, coming off a critical and box office slump that consumed most of the ’90s, Ridley Scott struck back with Gladiator. (It’s hard now to remember that at the time it was only Scott’s 11th feature film.) It told the story of Roman general Maximus…
Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieślowski has achieved something that only the Russian formalist Dziga Vertov did with his epochal film Man with a Movie Camera 60…
One thing left uncertain: just who are Dorothy Gale’s parents? I don’t quite mean that literally, though the overgrown Oz extended universe probably has an answer for me. For instance, in a 2007 apocryphal novel, Halloween in Oz: Dorothy Returns, authors Leo Moser and Carol Nelson assert that…
Humphrey Bogart was one of the most prolific and widely admired actors of the Hollywood studio system, and though he is still known for the memorably rough-hewn masculinity he displayed in films ranging from The Maltese Falcon to Sabrina, the details of his life risk being forgotten 67…
“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening montage of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Clément Pinteaux’s jump-cut editing and Ranabir Das’ mobile camerawork enhance this feeling of poetic…
Living as we all are in a post-Romantasy world, certain chain bookstores (RIP Borders) have been financially reinvigorated. This, of course, has simultaneously resulted in the ruination (no, not an overreaction) of poetry and fantasy as respectable, substantive genres of literature — to different degrees, of course; let’s…
As the planet’s future grows increasingly precarious and uncertain, films exploring a post-apocalyptic landscape are certainly having their moment in the sun, particularly ones featuring high-concept monster premises. This year alone saw the release of Arcadian, a low-budget thriller starring Nicolas Cage, E.L. Katz’s Azrael, and, more notably,…
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are very serious about film. Film itself, that is, and particularly the consumer-ready format of Super-8 that at one point gave millions across the globe the opportunity to make home movies affordably. They run Australia’s nanolab, where they’ve been processing, selling, and teaching…
Lauded cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto — credited for Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon within the same calendar year — makes his directorial debut with Pedro Páramo, adapted from Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel. A seminal and celebrated work of magical realism that reportedly shocked Gabriel Garcia Marquez out…
In animator Jérémy Clapin’s live-action feature debut Meanwhile on Earth, Elsa (Megan Northam), sister of astronaut Franck (depicted by Yoan Germain Le mat, voiced by Sébastien Pouderoux), finds herself adrift and grieving after Franck becomes lost in space and presumed dead. She spends her time working at the…
Xu Haofeng makes movies for people who enjoy and understand the finer points of martial arts choreography. His best-known film work (he’s also a novelist) is probably the screenplay for Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, in which Wing Chun master Ip Man navigates the various schools and styles of…
Lithuanian myths, folk songs, and hallucinations guide Deimantas Narkevičius’s film Twittering Soul. Set in the late 19th century before the Lumière Brothers began making films in France, the film roots itself in the countryside of Southern Lithuania. Vast shots of bucolic greenery sweep across the screen, accompanied by…
Director Mikio Naruse never garnered the acclaim of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Akira Kurosawa. The absence of a clearly legible “minimalism” (a reductive descriptor of Ozu’s style, for what it’s worth), elaborate long takes, and sweeping historical epics from his oeuvre hasn’t quite given Western cinephiles easy…
In our modern world, love and cynicism often seem to dance in a delicate balance. In an age where skepticism frequently overshadows sincerity, it’s easy to question the existence of love stories that transcend either the commonplace or the schmaltzy. We are bombarded with tales of fleeting romances,…
Our multiplexes and home theaters desperately miss the erotic thriller. Every few years, one or two squeaky clean PG-13 studio productions will don the mask of the erotic thriller: recently, The Voyeurs, Sanctuary, and even Challengers. (The latter two at least flash a little bit of sex appeal…
Writer-director David Moreau has set himself a tall task with his new film MadS, namely how to rejuvenate the moribund zombie sub-genre while also justifying the use of the annoyingly prevalent one-single-long-take gimmick. Regarding the later, we’ve discussed before the limitations of this particular formal gambit; for every…
Frat lives fall flat. That, at least to the outsider, is a reasonable conclusion to draw from the many unwelcome instances of its bearers disrupting our quotidian sensibilities: humiliation and hazing rituals gone wrong, casual misogyny substantiated by serious sexual transgression, and even the empty beer cans and…