At first glance, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence seems to exist in opposition to its creator’s body of work. Directed and co-written by Nagisa Ôshima, an icon of the Japanese New Wave — a movement which also included Toshio Matsumoto, Shôhei Imamura, and Seijun Suzuki — the film contains…
Essential Truths of the Lake As yet another Hong Sang-soo project makes the rounds, surely to be followed in four to six months by another, even newer film, it’s worth reflecting on just how prolific Lav Diaz is, too. While Hong has turned out 17 movies in the…
Cory Finely’s Landscape With Invisible Hand is an innocuous, flimsy little sci-fi movie, bandying about high concepts and reasonably detailed world-building but resolutely refusing to engage with any of its ideas in a meaningful way. It’s a game of spot the metaphor — aliens as disruptive tech bros,…
The programmers at the Fantasia International Film Festival can be counted on, year after year, to assemble a strong lineup of retrospective screenings, from new restorations to rarely seen 35mm prints. The 2023 edition was no different, with its 4K restoration of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Lee Chang-dong’s…
Crime-thriller road films are a long-beloved American trademark, from Badlands to True Romance. In his new feature The Passenger, Carter Smith takes us on a ride unlike any other, for better or worse; unlike most of its subgenre predecessors, The Passenger doesn’t take us cross-country, and neither of…
River Director Yamaguchi Junta’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was a delightful no-budget time travel comedy that hit the scene a couple of years ago, delighting audiences with its audaciously simple premise — a man discovers his computer monitor is linked to another downstairs which displays events that…
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World To the uninitiated, written descriptions of Radu Jude’s cinema might give the wrong impression of his films as dizzyingly dialectical exercises requiring a complete working knowledge of the last century of Romanian politics, 20th-century philosophers and artists,…
Before the age of BookTok commenced, which both invigorated the eternally dying publishing industry and perhaps brought about the death of literature by pushing sub-AI writing and storytelling to the fore of public consciousness and the printed word zeitgeist, novels like Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue…
The directorial duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have been regulars on the festival circuit for the better part of twenty years, but they have yet to really break through to a larger audience. They began as documentary filmmakers, but eventually turned to feature filmmaking, building fictional…
Red Rooms In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse — only by Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible that year. The controversy bespoke radicality, and that radicality remains till this day: from its premise…
One or two festivals ago, who can remember which — this time of year they all blend together — this critic wrote about Nomad, Patrick Tam’s 1982 Hong Kong New Wave classic about languorous young adults idling away their time in young love and angular fashions before suddenly…
MONDAYS Anyone who has ever worked a 9-5 office job has likely felt stuck performing the same meaningless tasks day after day. The only possibility to break the cycle, one imagines, is a new job — preferably, doing something different and for better wages, too. There’s something quite…
No film festival would be complete without a road movie. For the 2023 edition of Japan Cuts, the U.S. premiere of Under the Turquoise Sky checks that box. The country being traveled is Mongolia, and the stated purpose is for Takeshi (Yuya Yagir) to find a woman at…
Earlier in 2023, this writer vacationed in Montreal and saw Eckhart Schmidt’s The Fan (1982) at the Cinéma Moderne, going in completely blind and only later learning of its controversy: Desireé Nosbusch, who plays the film’s lead, was then only sixteen when she was forced against her will…
Repentance is good. At least, it is under certain conditions: it must be clear, sincere, and selfless. Most importantly, while it is always good for the morally at fault to repent, their victims can never be made to forgive their assailant. The Legend & Butterfly, the new film…
Do we still need the album? That question — elicited by the advent of streaming music platforms and the musicians’ newfound ability to self-publish songs as soon as they’re finished — calls out the album as a historical object, not a permanent fixture in music culture. LPs, introduced…
The career of Romanian director Paul Negoescu has not been easy to pin down. His debut feature, A Month in Thailand (2012), was a remarkable, neo-Rohmerian character study — an expertly documented journey through Bucharest’s club scene on New Year’s Eve, which slips in its fictional shaping almost…
No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real world. Suburban haunted houses of poltergeists and conjurings, complete with a jumpscare-per-minute metric, would surely find an audience, as would a Gothic romance in…
The past decade suggests an encroaching — or, perhaps at this point, arrived — renaissance in Indigenous art. Regardless of the medium, native voices are becoming not only pervasive, but essential to the spectrum of modern American art. Authors like Tommy Orange, Brandon Hobson, and Stephen Graham Jones…
Nomad (Director’s Cut) One of the finest films of the Hong Kong New Wave, Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982), plays at this year’s NYAFF in a new restoration, advertised as a “Director’s Cut.” As near as I can figure, the only real difference between this version and the one…