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…
Lichens Are the Way As documentaries go, the subject of plant life tends to suffer from a lack of tangible movement. Inertia, ascribed to the slow-moving, still hearkens back to the animate, whereas vegetative existence — although a step up from the mineral — takes stillness to be…
What is the difference between a filmmaker and a filmer? Watching archival films assembled from home movies, it’s difficult to escape the long shadow of Jonas Mekas — a man who did not view his work as artistic, but compelled by a “necessity” to move forward, to keep…
The premise is familiar: three young women spend their holiday by the sea, relaxing, flirting, and drinking; Jacques Rozier fertilizes this unremarkable narrative turf with a freewheeling spirit and melancholic edge in his second feature, Du Côté d’Orouët, premiering at 2024 FiDMarseille in a new 4K restoration. Made…
Actor-turned-director Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love opens with a philosophical debate. In a brown-toned home, inflected with ember and golden highlights, old friends discuss the question of romantic love. Children scream in the background, and wine is being spilled as they speak frankly and intimately about the…