How do you prove that you don’t speak a language? Especially when that language, English, is a tool of centuries-old oppression wielded by one of the largest global empires in history, and your mother tongue, Irish, is spoken by less than 10,000 people in a highly contested corner…
Cuckoo The first obvious parallel to Tilman Singer’s horror-thriller Cuckoo is The Shining. A family — Luis (Marton Csokas), the patriarch, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), his teenage daughter, Beth (Jessica Henwick), the stepmom, and Alma (Mila Lieu), Beth’s young, mute daughter — has packed up not just from the…
The Code If nothing else, Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker dedicated to understanding how we live with technology, and his greatest strength is a willingness to confront how uncinematic this can be and to push himself to invent something new. He takes the mundanity of staring at our…
In her 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin grapples with the aftermath of a near-fatal bear attack in the Siberian wilderness, an attack which left her mutilated and also threw her life out of balance in a more philosophical and spiritual sense.…
Allan Dwan’s happenstance journey into Hollywood is marked by a myriad of right time-right place encounters that allowed the young engineer to become one of the first great directors in Tinseltown. He initially started script-writing as a way to make some extra cash, but was soon thrust into…
Like an oak presiding over what came before and what might follow, Kier-La Janisse’s documentary study Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) roots folk horror to the forces that found the sub-genre while gesturing toward how the tradition keeps perpetuating. To watch the film in 2021, half-in and…
The Killers Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is currently out in cinemas, anthology films are arguably having a moment. The appeal of such a…
Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is currently out in cinemas, anthology films are arguably having a moment. The appeal of such a project is…
Norris Wong’s first feature film, My Prince Edward, was one of the better Hong Kong indie movies of recent years. It starred singer/actress Stephy Tang as a young woman caught between East and West, Hong Kong and China, one man and another. Wong avoided all the expected turns…
Where does a song come from? And how does it happen? In November 2021, driven back inside to obsess about air particles again thanks to NYC’s Omicron wave, home-viewed footage of Paul McCartney conjuring the riff to “Get Back” seemingly out of thin air became a kind of…
Without further context, one could be forgiven for conflating Skywalkers: A Love Story with yet another Star Wars spinoff. Donning the Jedi’s patronymic and draped with a subtitle reminiscent of a legacy franchise brewing its nostalgic strains, this documentary, directed by Jeff Zimbalist (with a co-director’s credit to…
In the canon of the silent cinema, only once has it been truly silent. The purifying beam of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, whose images are so searing — so totally self-sufficient — that they need no musical accompaniment. The film is to be viewed as…
The sixth Herman Yau film released in the last two years is probably the strangest. Long a denizen of Hong Kong’s underground, making his name in the ’90s with a series of ultra-violent and gory Category III thrillers that had a strong element of social and political protest…
Nicole Riegel’s debut feature Holler was an unusually sharp bit of indie realism, an unvarnished look at economic depression in the aftermath of NAFTA via a dilapidated Rust Belt by way of the opioid epidemic. It’s taken a few years, but Riegel has finally returned with a sophomore film,…
Crossing opens with a title card stating that Georgian and Turkish are gender-neutral languages, with grammar not containing gender-oriented articles. We then are introduced to retired teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli), as she visits a former student living in a shack on the beach with his family, trying to…
The clean and well-organized business environs of Sho Miyake’s All the Long Nights seem to come straight from the catalogue; the city skyline casts an ambient evening glow; each member of the professional class is wearing an in-style ensemble; the soundtrack is a recurring theme of anodyne electronic…
Confusing glibness for frothy irreverence, Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon primarily caters to two long-underserved segments of the audience: those yearning for the reemergence of the mid-sized, movie star-driven romantic comedy and the conspiracy theory-curious. A speculative history of the events leading up to the July 1969…
Lazaro at Night Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and beguiling, inventive narrative structures that make otherwise simple movies anything but — these are the artistic hallmarks that have granted director Hong Sang-soo a…
Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and beguiling, inventive narrative structures that make otherwise simple movies anything but — these are the artistic hallmarks that have granted director Hong Sang-soo a well-deserved cult following.…
ESSAYS WORLD WIDE WEB OF DREAD: HORROR FROM THE YEAR OF THE WEB, 30 YEARS LATER FEATURE BY: Mike Thorn CRAFT AS POLITICAL PRAXIS OR: FUCK THAT, FREE PALESTINE — MASAO ADACHI & KOJI WAKAMATSU’S RED ARMY/PFLP: DECLARATION OF WORLD WAR FEATURE BY: Vicky Huang A SURVEY OF…