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…
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 that was initially…
The history of the Western is fertile territory for studying many of the greatest American filmmakers of the 20th century. While none worked exclusively in the genre — Ford, Hawks, Mann, Boetticher, Lewis, de Toth, and a litany of others dabbled in all manner of modes — each…
Young filmmakers making gangster-adjacent genre films is a time-honored tradition — it’s a mode of moviemaking with a built-in propensity for ready-made conflict, violence, stylized nighttime photography, and maybe even some doomed romanticism. Na Jiazuo’s debut feature Streetwise fits snuggly into this well-worn niche, a Jia Zhangke-inflected bit…
Long serving as a fun bit of Internet trivia to stoke the engagement machine, fervently celebrated actor/writer/director Greta Gerwig’s canceled 2014 CBS pilot — a gender-flipped reboot of How I Met Your Mother naturally dubbed How I Met Your Dad — takes on a retroactive significance as she…
In the midst of the World War Two, Australian journalist Paul Brickhill was bored by reality; to him, war fever was a case of major hysteria, and despite his advancement from stuttering cadet journalist to sub-editor at a regional imprint, the monotonous prospects of his job breathed enough…
“Girlfriend” — whether the companionship implied is defined via romantic means, as a partnership, or via an external projection of friendship, the term is more often mistaken for whichever suggests a bond closer to heterosexual “normalcy.” Between girlfriends, the line between the two meanings can grow thin, stretching…