New rom-com The Con-Heartist comes courtesy of director Mez Tharatorn, a filmmaker who made a name for himself in his native Thailand with 2012’s…
Ninja Girl In a bleak, post-Trump reality wherein nationalist hogwash has pervaded casual discourse, Yû Irie’s Ninja Girl reflects the kind of right-minded rhetoric…
Together is an endurance test for viewers and a self-satisfied pat on the back from the filmmakers. Stephen Daldry has become a bit of a…
It’s probably unnecessary to note that Japanese (pop) culture, and more specifically its cinema today, has a sort of very vivid coolness and charm…
Daniel de la Vega’s On the Third Day, co-written by Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura, begins with three separate lives intersecting on a dark,…
The Sadness Canadian director Rob Jabbaz shot The Sadness, his debut feature, in Taiwan, with a fully Taiwanese cast and script that draws in…
No Man of God works surprisingly well for a while, but fails to stick its schlocky landing. On the day before the official premiere…
Chen Yu-hsun’s My Missing Valentine swept the 2020 Golden Horse Awards, winning Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Editing, and Visual Effects out of a…
Joint The debut feature of New York-based filmmaker Oudai Kojima, Joint takes the structure of a rise-and-fall gangster picture and tries to imbue it…
Flag Day’s aesthetic cribbing and histrionic character result in a floundering film that feels too desperate by half. The realm of biography occupies an…
The Protégé is sometimes tonally ungainly, but its no-frills, old-school action filmmaking are a breath of fresh air in an increasingly CGI-saturated genre. When she’s…
Horror-comedy is one of the hardest cinematic lines to toe, but 1981’s An American Werewolf in London is perhaps the greatest existing instance of…
Luzifer A former student of Michael Haneke’s, now operating under the Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion banner, Peter Brunner seems primed (and positioned) to be Austria’s…
Unlike the booming fame and splendor of Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Shibuya districts, sister neighborhood Shimokitazawa is most well-known among the young locals for its…
Ohku Akiko’s Hold Me Back is, like her 2017 film Tremble All You Want, a portrait of a lonely young woman whose inner life…
Limbo Photography is the first sign that Soi Cheang’s Limbo is different from the director’s past work. Though his return to Hong Kong was…
Ma Belle, My Beauty is a lovingly realized and mature look at polyamory, but it fails to probe its emotional core sufficiently. Polyamory is a…
Last August, fresh from the premiere of time-bending action thriller Tenet, Tom Cruise giddily proclaimed: “Big movie. Big screen. Loved it.” Nolan’s movie may…
Back to the Wharf Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf begins with a tragic accident that escalates, shockingly, to murder. After high school student…