The interaction between documenting the act of filmmaking and the final film as a meaning-making document for the filmmaker, subject, and spectator is a staple of postmodern Iranian cinema. Abbas Kiarostami experimented with it first in Close-Up (1990) and then in Through the Olive Trees (1994); Jafar Panahi,…
France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary energy into his Les Chants du Maldoror, a prose poem featuring a man so evil and ugly that he denies killing himself such…
The subject of the poets and poetry of Hong Kong is a natural for Ann Hui, always the most literarily inclined of the great directors of her generation, the Hong Kong New Wave. Before studying film in London, she earned a master’s degree in English and Comparative Literature…
Although its title might suggest otherwise, the breakfast food most prominently employed as a metaphor in Scrambled, Leah McKendrick’s directorial debut, is not eggs, but rather the aptly millennial avocado. Overripe avocados, condemned to their state of wrinkled, discolored decay, serve as an unsubtle manifestation of aimless 34-year-old…
Following quickly after the opening credits to She is Conann — a rapid montage of freakish landscapes played to a hypnotic classical piece — director Bertrand Mandico throws us into a beguiling opening sequence that immediately situates viewers in a strange world. An elderly woman, cloaked in a…
Director and co-writer Alex Schaad has made a bold gamble with his new film Skin Deep, taking what is essentially an ‘80s-style body-swap premise and crafting it into a subdued, even solemn art film about depression, relationships, and sexuality. It gives life to the old cliché about loving…
Head South For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known to modern man. From D.W. Griffith and the reimagining of an idyllic Confederacy in The Birth of a Nation, to Nazi glorification under…
The recent construction of the $217 million Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, confirmed by Hindu mythology as Shri Ram’s birthplace in India, and the ruling right-wing party’s wide publicization of its consecration ceremony has, amongst many other things, perpetuated a fixed definition of religious devotion. It’s an outwardly expressed…
The virtues of Danish director Nikolaj Arcel’s new feature, The Promised Land, are those of old-school Hollywood studio pictures. The film is scrupulously well-constructed in the narrative sense — its main characters and conflicts are cleanly established within the first 10 minutes. It moves along at a steady…
Citizen Weiner What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for the dopamine high of instant, ephemeral virality which, once achieved, only begets more rushes, more clicks, more highs. If such is…
Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, Mambar Pierrette, opens with the mundane rhythms of domestic work. Mambar (Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat), a seamstress in the city of Douala in Cameroon, prepares lunch for her ailing mother and three children. She then wakes her mother, applies ointment on her feet,…
Where have all the taboo romances gone? Admittedly, the trailer for Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl didn’t inspire much hope for their return, particularly since the Martin Freeman–Jenna Ortega pairing doesn’t exactly scream “steamy” — it doesn’t scream much of anything, really. Still, the possibility of some melodramatic,…
There’s something to be said for the classic rom-com template. Many may find the standard 90-minute course of events tired, but there’s comfort to be found in the expected. Oftentimes, the films that flounder in this genre are the ones that attempt to break from the norm and…
Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s most impressive career achievement to-date might have come during the 2013 Golden Horse Awards, when his debut feature, Ilo Ilo, won the Best Picture prize, in the process beating out Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, Johnnie To’s Drug War, and Jia…
A lush, elemental reckoning unfurls across the relatively condensed runtime of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s debut, The Settlers, even if few of its proceedings strictly qualify as terse. In fact, the film’s tersest narrative developments are matched by a formal languor which, enveloping the mountainous landscapes of Patagonia alongside…
I have clear memories of watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) as a pre-teen. The spring and summertime passages of the film are most prominent in my recollections — the blissful, transient loveliness of flowers, billowing curtains, and butterflies. The image of the tragic Romantic poet John Keats…
If there is one subgenre that has sadly been neglected in the 21st century, it’s that of the airplane thriller, where the action unfurls in a built-in claustrophobic setting 40,000 in the air, escape all but impossible. The ‘90s saw a boon in this particular corner of entertainment,…
With only two feature films under his belt, writer-director Jeymes Samuel seems to have found a particular niche; specifically tackling well-wore genre fare dominated by white voices and filtering it through a Black lens, topicality practically woven into its DNA as a result. New biblical epic The Book…
As the 1950s progressed, Nicholas Ray found himself in an increasingly precarious, even fraught relationship with filmmaking. He directed 14 films in 10 years, a breakneck pace even for the heyday of the studio system. The films run the gamut from masterpiece to simple director-for-hire assignments, although the…
Both the serial killer film and the road movie have storied and traceable cinematic histories, operating in movements that often weave past and around each other, occasionally merging at a zeitgeist-driven nexus. The two sub-genres make for a compelling dialogue, with our cultural conception and artistic reflection of…
“Considered mechanically, a duck is not an efficient machine.” So observes Vague McMenamy, an amateur inventor living in pre-industrial Glasgow who resolves to improve the inhabitants of his grandmother’s pond with the help of his latest invention, the crankshaft. After McMenamy succeeds in creating an impressively speedy “duckboat,”…