Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who imbued such courtly antics with lively flourish to inspire the critical reflexivity and popular recognition that has come to define the Western (and thus modern) literary scene. The…
Sadly, new romantic comedy About My Father is not a companion piece to Pedro Almodóvar’s magnificent All About My Mother, but instead an attempted star vehicle for rising stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco, who makes a lot of jokes about being Italian that so inspire fits of wheezing laughter…
A delicate and bittersweet queer coming-of-age film, A Song Sung Blue is also, unfortunately, weighed down by all the predictable beats that befall its bildungsroman genre. Set in the early 2010s in Harbin, China, Geng Zihan’s debut feature follows fifteen-year-old Liu Xian (Zhou Meijun), who’s sent off to…
In This Issue: FEATURES: CANNES FILM FESTIVAL: Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda) by Lawrence Garcia // Only The River Flows (Wei Shujun) by Micahel Sicinski // Marguerite’s Theorem (Anna Novion) by Andrew Dignan // The Pot-au-Feu (Trần Anh Hùng) by Emilio Diaz // A Prince (Pierre Creton) by Michael Sicinski // Vincent Must Die (Karim Leklou) by…
In 1972, struggling to follow up his generation-defining and career-redefining What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye had writer’s block. The ambitious concept album detailing the social strifes of the Vietnam era was hailed as groundbreaking and had become Motown’s biggest record to date. Following its success, Gaye renegotiated his…
Trần Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu charts a romance between gourmet chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoit Magimel) and his cook, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), in late 18th-century France. Their relationship as creative collaborators and lovers sidesteps the typical pitfalls of complicated entanglement or fraught power dynamics, Hùng instead taking a more…
Radu Jude’s new short, The Potemkinists, finds the director in typically didactic form, which is one of his greatest virtues — why not say what you mean, especially when it comes to politics? At the present moment, film holds perhaps the least cultural impact it has ever had,…
Typically, calling a film a faithful adaptation of its source material can constitute praise. It’s a signal of approval, a fan’s casual imprimatur. It’s a definitive blessing that this new entry has retained enough of the source’s initial look, feel, and spirit so as to be worthy of…
“The place? New York City. The time? Now: 1962. And there’s no time or place like it.” Down With Love, Peyton Reed’s 2003 technicolor pastiche of the 1960s battle-of-the-sexes rom-com, begins with the above winking acknowledgement, which makes clear two things: its own artificiality and a recognition that,…
A high-angle shot of a yakuza and his girlfriend continues following the woman overhead as she crosses a street to a school swimming pool. The camera then passes over the pool’s fence and lands on portly bully Deguchi, who calls out from atop a diving board, “I have…
Love Again sounds like a title where novelty goes to die, and the resulting film certainly does nothing to deviate from such lowered expectations, even with the appearance of beloved French-Canadian songstress Céline Dion, making her feature film debut. It’s rather ironic that star Priyanka Chopra Jonas finally…
Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? comes courtesy of Studio Canal and Working Title, two production companies who have created a cottage industry of star-laden British features that tend to err on the side of twee in their depiction of love in the modern age,…
Perennially undervalued, Joseph H. Lewis receives a single paragraph in Andrew Sarris’ canonical The American Cinema (relegated to the expressive esoterica category alongside Andre de Toth, Allan Dwan, Jacques Tourneur, etc.). Sarris at least has the good sense to give a special mention to Gun Crazy, which he…
It’s easy to see into the future. All one has to do is see the present and ask what would happen if we accepted the weirdest part of it. It’s always funny to inevitably get the details wrong — the 1970s color palettes of Logan’s Run (1976) or…
Part of what’s so great about the Prismatic Ground festival is that it makes space for genuine cinematic curios, works that are so sufficiently distinct from usual modes of creation that they might otherwise slip through the cracks. That is definitely the case with Where Is This Street?,…
Alexandre Larose’s work is no stranger to the descriptors underlined by Impressionism, typically reflecting its aesthetic sensibilities of refracted, textured light. In fact, he seems to lean into these sensibilities in the synopses for the three films that comprise his scènes de ménage, discerning them — each a…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done a great job of earning a reputation for grinding down the personalities of interesting directors-for-hire with endless tinkering and boring pre-vizzed visual effects sequences. Filmmakers like Edgar Wright, Ryan Coogler, and Sam Raimi have all struggled, to varying degrees of success or…
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Eight Mountains opens with a young man’s voiceover accompanying a series of natural Italian landscapes. The voice belongs to Pietro, the only son of Torinese middle-class parents — his father a factory engineer, his mother a teacher…
Concerning the brief, fleeting romance between a woman who writes audio descriptions for films and her harshest critic, an all but totally blind man, Naomi Kawase’s thinly-sketched Radiance feels designed to court claims of poignancy. The pair clash repeatedly as she tries to lend assistance he thinks he…
Is there a greater rags-to-riches story than Charlie Chaplin’s? A real-life tramp, Chaplin grew up dirt poor on the streets of London. The son of two destitute music hall entertainers (dad an abusive alcoholic, mom committed to a mental institution), as a child, Chaplin showed promise performing stage…
In what can be construed both as commendation and criticism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. is assuredly a film of the times. Its contemporary grappling with hot-button issues, alongside its pointedly liminal geographic setting, enables a somewhat twofold diagnosis of political and ideological relationships, from the positions of both oppressor…