Although a bit of a scaling down from his previous tech-heavy outings, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is nothing if not a fully realized vision: a deeply felt black and white love letter to the director’s youth, and more specifically, to the young maid who raised him. But the film lacks much…
An unfulfilled housewife drifts away from her mannered husband by selling her body whenever he’s away in Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance—a film that seems in conversation with Luis Buñuel’s classic Belle de Jour. As with his forebear, the central transgression Sono is after is the wandering sex life of an ostensibly monogamous woman,…
Michael Showalter, in the past decade, has parlayed his success as a comedic writer and performer into a career as a writer-director of audience-pleasing dramedies on film and television, representing microgenres from the prestige biopic to the age-gap romance, and often anchored by strong performances from seasoned actresses.…
Now in its 36th edition, the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) has taken on a most prominent role within the country’s cultural landscape, drawing younger and younger audiences among its wide demographic range to participate in an ongoing series of conversations centered around the world of cinema. Founded…
Over the weekend of November 14-16, I viewed the entirety of Twin Peaks: The Return, screened thanks to the great efforts of the Philadelphia Film Society. Parts 1-4 were shown Friday night, parts 5-11 on Saturday, and parts 12-18 on Sunday. It was, perhaps needless to say, a…
Julia Jackman’s sophomore feature 100 Nights of Hero, adapted from Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel of the same name, has the shape and tone of a fairy tale, coupled with a clear reference to One Thousand and One Nights. In a fantasy world that worships the patriarchal god Birdman…
In Japan, where customs and a sturdy veneer of politeness greatly determine how people interact with one another, there is a strong emphasis on propriety, which comes with its ups and downs. Propriety stifles creative expression, suppressing much-needed raw emotion; it also sets out new paths of release…
2024 has shaped up to be a boon year for DIY cinema, with achievements like Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker emerging as critical darlings and massive audience hits alike. Despite their minuscule budgets and relatively unknown performers, these films have been lauded for their formal ingenuity…
Perhaps we’ve been sold an overly literal version of heaven when we jump at the chance to live forever. While theologians balk at how transactional the idea is (80-odd years of good behavior for everlasting happiness), preachers and any self-help guru worth their salt capitulate nonetheless to our…
Sequel naming conventions can be a funny thing. The majority will opt for merely adding the next sequential numeral — Roman or otherwise — while others will eschew a traditional numbering system for the prestigious subtitle. (And some will offer both, as in the case of Breakin’ 2:…
Silence — like its two unassuming allies, stillness and slowness — is often positioned as a response to mainstream cinema’s reckless noisiness. But contemporary indie Indian cinema that has most recently garnered international acclaim — like, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) and, to a lesser extent, Neeraj…
Follies If the sex comedy has become a rare breed in the two decades since its American Pie-to-Apatow heyday in the aughts, the marriage comedy, a staple of the classical Hollywood screwball comedy with origins in Shakespearean romance, has been largely dead as the dodo since the 1940s. Perhaps…
“Life is cheesy sometimes,” says Liz (Valerie Pachner) in voiceover, moments before turning around at the airport and running back to embrace her lover, Ahmed (Amir El-Masry). Life might be cheesy, but it’s never that ironic and self-conscious. Great emotions don’t come to us in quotation marks. The…
If the sex comedy has become a rare breed in the two decades since its American Pie-to-Apatow heyday in the aughts, the marriage comedy, a staple of the classical Hollywood screwball comedy with origins in Shakespearean romance, has been largely dead as the dodo since the 1940s. Perhaps…
It’s quite obvious at this point that Netflix has firmed up their annual Christmas lineup formula by tugging at millennials’ soft spots via a mix of throwback nostalgia, cozy seasonal sentiment, and the casting of cherished teen icons of yesteryear. Over the past few holidays, we’ve seen Lindsay…
Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress in the mid-70s in films by King Hu and Li Han-hsiang, she moved into producing in her native Taiwan, where she was instrumental in…
The cabin in the woods: as reliable a setup as there is in all of horror. The isolation of new lovers leaving the world and a sense of security behind to focus exclusively on one another only to find themselves overcome by evil external forces (or one another);…
“What’s a pretty girl like you,” asks Don King, the all-time boxing promoter played by Chad L. Coleman, “doing getting punched in the face?” Christy isn’t just a star vehicle for Sydney Sweeney —it’s a chance to prove her toughness, perhaps her mettle as a method actor. “Because…
During my short self-directed crash course on Argentine cinema last month, I was surprised how little had been written in English on the subject. There are specialty studies, especially regarding the country’s golden era of noir filmmaking, but certainly no one-stop shop for the merely curious. My own…
There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A boat launched in the West Sea could not make port in the East, nor could a boat launched in the East Sea make…