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,”…
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…