There isn’t a filmmaker out there quite like Danielle Arbid. The French-Lebanese director has crafted films about war, family, isolation, and the perils of love — love that is often expressed through graphic eroticism. Notably, her 2007 film A Lost Man is to date regarded as the most…
The following statement about Alan Resnick’s first feature, Dance Freak, can easily be misconstrued as a fault on the film, an accusation of artistic counterfeit. For one, the very mention of something reminding one of David Lynch’s body of work is automatically cause for alarm, that the subject…
Latvian cinema, and especially animation, has been under either a spotlight or a microscope, depending on the vantage point, since Flow took home the country’s first-ever Academy Award. The 2025 French industry event Cartoon Movie spotlighted the Baltic country’s animation, and the country has even further capitalized on…
There’s a lot to take from A Sad and Beautiful World, the feature debut from documentarian Cyris Aris, ostensibly a straight-faced drama of love in a time of war, but what one might not expect is a darkly affecting genre subversion. There’s an unacknowledged privilege to the great…
Three years ago, I wrote an essay arguing Allen Fong’s Ah Ying (1983) paints a more realistic picture of 1980s Hong Kong than Wong Kar-wai’s arthouse cinema and other action films of the era. While more commercially successful internationally, these counterparts offer idealized versions of Hong Kong, replete…
If you have ever had a chance to see Hadestown live, you won’t wonder at its success, running on Broadway for seven years now despite a financially unstable industry, with news of Cats: The Jellicle Ball’s closure coming quickly on the heels of three Tony Awards and nine…
Though Western cinephiles are likely most familiar with Herman Yau through the grisly Category III shockers he made with Anthony Wong (Taxi Hunter, The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome), the director has always been a filmmaker who plays in the bigger pool. Even in the ‘90s, his filmography included…
The castles of Ludwig II seem to resound with that Wagnerian mystery: here time becomes space. They seem to distend from some turreted past; a time of knights, gallants, banners figured by the wind. Such times did exist in Bavaria, but never such as this. Never with such…
Christopher Nolan is the movies now. For good or ill, he has been anointed as the ultimate modern filmmaker, a Spielbergian master pushing the medium of mainstream moviegoing into a purely experiential realm. We’ve got people traveling cross-country to see his movies in 70mm IMAX — even if…
It was in December 1923, only months after military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera had seized power amidst the ongoing systemic crisis of Spain’s Restoration period — the Restauración borbónica — that informalismo painter Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona. Throughout his lifetime, he remained a son of…
In dreams, everyone is equal. Regardless of age, status, or character, we all sleep. In sleep, we all dream. And there, what happens is, for the most part, beyond our control. The waking hopes and aspirations, the fears and concerns, the preoccupations with past, present, and future, all…
Among the standout films that played at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was The Dreamed Adventure, which earned Valeska Grisebach the Jury Prize and marked the long-awaited return of one of contemporary European cinema’s most distinctive voices. Set in Svilengrad, a Bulgarian town on the border with Turkey and…
Where experimental film is concerned, that subsection we call “structural film” is characterized by a radical transparency. This may seem like an odd claim to the uninitiated, but like all aesthetic claims, it must be understood in historical context. While structural films are by no means “normal” films…
Given that present-day existence has been thrown into disarray by — in roughly chronological order — the smartphone, COVID-19, and the resurgence of fascism, how exactly do we make it through the day? More specifically, how can we characterize our current experience of quotidian time? We can often…
Despite crediting the scholar and film critic Andrei Rus as a co-director, the latest and possibly trolliest Radu Jude film is really more of an act of co-curation than of filmmaking: it is 35 minutes of Romanian TikTok videos, drolly titled Little Poems in Prose in homage to…