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…
The themes of time and guilt are ribboned together in Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, a modest yet sweeping period drama set in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century. Based on a Denis Johnson novella, the film chronicles a fictional — although clearly meant to…
“Baahubali!” The name rings out like music. Maybe you’ve heard it before, or maybe you haven’t, but the song sounds sweet just the same. S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali is back: sliced, diced, and repackaged as a single film. A two-part box office behemoth in India —The Conclusion remains the…
Justin Lin, once at the helm of the Fast & Furious franchise — including entries four through six, as well as two and nine — has made a change with the peculiar, personal Last Days. His latest backtracks through the life of John Allen Chau, a young, zealous…
Karim Leklou has a fascinating face, a seemingly unremarkable assemblage of features that acts like a blank slate; it’s a Kuleshov-effect visage. Director Clément Cogitore put this phenomenon to great use in last year’s Sons of Ramses, an as-yet-undistributed sorta-thriller that cast Leklou as a fake medium who…