Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 romantic drama, premiered at that year’s Cannes Film Festival where it received a rather muted response, even from admirers of the Taiwanese auteur who was coming off the 1998 period film Flowers of Shanghai. In an otherwise mildly positive review for the New…
It’s impossible to talk about 2023 without talking about Barbie and Oppenheimer, two very different films that became seismic pop culture sensations, crushing the box office while garnering no small amount of critical acclaim in the process. This is, of course, the Hollywood dream: four-quadrant pictures that appeal…
It’s impossible to talk about 2023 without talking about Barbie and Oppenheimer, two very different films that became seismic pop culture sensations, crushing the box office while garnering no small amount of critical acclaim in the process. This is, of course, the Hollywood dream: four-quadrant pictures that appeal…
The great director Paul W.S. Anderson expressed irritation in his commentary track on Alien vs. Predator (2004) to the common descriptor used to label films with relentless energy and unceasing action as “roller coaster” rides. The description misses the source of the thrilling catharsis of amusement park rides:…
Dashing Through the Snow It seems wholly appropriate that Disney’s new holiday comedy Dashing Through the Snow bypassed theaters completely and premiered on the studio’s exclusive streaming service, as everything about it, from the crummy CGI to the hackneyed plotting and characterization, feels beyond low-rent, a desperate attempt…
Michel Franco is a director who approaches unadorned tragedy with great familiarity; not as a shock or an inconvenience, but as the organizing principle of a chaotic world. His two last films, Sun Down and New Order, both focus on the downfall of the sad, privileged elite. His…
A major fear factor in horror stems from isolation, and its pervasive influence extends to both claustrophobic and agoraphobic conditions. Whether confined within a box — with no way out when evil seeps in — or swept up in unknown expanses, the absence of some physical or symbolic…
More than almost any other director, the methods of Michael Mann’s filmmaking have always matched its meanings, and his characters are defined by their attempts to reconcile (or avoid reconciling) two contradictory impulses: a dogged, almost monastic pursuit of perfection or personal transcendence on the one hand, and…
The latest piece of cotton candy in the ever-prolific François Ozon’s filmography, The Crime is Mine (Mon Crime) finds him restaging a 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil in a mode stuck somewhere between 1930s film pastiche and contemporary sensibilities. The film opens with the kind…
A gangster movie, a story of post-colonial alienation, a broad satire of academia, and a romantic comedy, Mexican director Fernando Frías’ latest film, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, is many films in one. Told via a labyrinthian plot structure that juggles a handful of different epistolary…
We live in cynical, hyperconnected times, and one remedy we rely on our cultural products to deliver now and again is genuine, unabashed sincerity. Feel-good stories sit on the opposing end of the spectrum to the gritty, deconstructive realism that’s been in vogue. If the latter offers a…
The latest Vietnamese box office sensation from Victor Vu, one of the country’s most prolific directors, The Last Wife teases the gaping hole for genre-defying historical romances in the international box office appetite. Set in the feudal 19th century Nguyen dynasty in Northern Vietnam, Vu adapts The Lake…
“I shall. For it is a happy tale.” So begins the lurid odyssey of flesh reformed and soul remade, a marionette reanimated by its creator for the world anew. In Poor Things, Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, the tale of Frankenstein emerges from its dark Gothic origins in Mary…
The Three Musketeers: Part I — D’Artagnan, the first of two entries as its title implies, is the French’s first major attempt at the material in over sixty years. With a combined budget of over $78 million and packed with an all-star international cast, D’Artagnan makes its case…
Alice Rohrwacher’s cinema occupies a unique place in the festival landscape, part pleasingly familiar and part bracingly daring, especially in the context of her relatively meteoric rise. After her debut Corpo Celeste played in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes 2011, her sophomore The Wonders won the Grand…
In Sean Price Williams’ directorial debut The Sweet East, Lillian (Talia Ryder) snaps to Ian (Jacob Elordi), “I believe that you’re more enamored in basking in your supposed infamy than winning a convert to your cause, which to my understanding has to do with creating a better cause.”…
After a shamelessly nepotistic career reboot last year with Snipers, a high-profile blockbuster directed with (and seemingly largely by) her father Zhang Yimou, Zhang Mo has returned to strike while the iron is hot with her first solo directorial feature since 2016’s by-the-numbers romantic comedy Suddenly Seventeen. Her…
As we enter the last release wave of true Covid films — those titles both produced during and concerned with the real-world crisis — first-time director Ma Xue introduces a new sort of pandemic film in her debut White River’s meandering sexual release valve. Situated on the other…
When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for quite some time: the ’50s saw him adapt the words of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Rashomon), Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot), and William Shakespeare (Throne of Blood)…
The art of adaptation precludes mere transcription, most particularly where the written word is translated to a visual medium like film. Nowhere is the canvas for this art more vast than in the realm of genre cinema, where the rules of reality hold no sway and imaginative faculties…
The camera’s all-encompassing eye, famously termed the “kino-eye” by Russian filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov, has always been capable of revealing the mysterious and hidden. Fiction and non-fiction filmmakers have used this (super)power to highlight not only the minutiae of human life, but also to explore its unassuming…