Superhost isn’t heavy on style and runs out of steam too early, but Gracie Gillam’s outlandishly unhinged performance keep things from becoming bland rehash. A companion piece of sorts to last year’s Airbnb slasher-riff The Rental, Brandon Christensen’s Superhost tills familiar anxieties about trusting strangers while navigating a particular kind of…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. With Yellow Cat, Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has taken that maxim to…
Sinkhole Nearly a decade after his previous feature, the 2012 big-budget disaster movie tentpole The Tower — South Korea’s very belated answer to The Towering Inferno — director Kim Ji-hoon returns to the apartment-building-in-extreme-peril genre with Sinkhole, a goofy and super-dumb yet undeniably entertaining commercial product. No prizes…
Filipino romantic drama Here and There opens with feisty heroine Len (Janine Gutierrez) engaging in an online war of words with the earnest and handsome Cabs (JC Santos). The time is March 2020, and Manila is in the first week of its COVID-induced lockdown. A seemingly innocent remark…
Wife of a Spy Though over three decades into his varied, distinctive career, American critics have only really paid Kiyoshi Kurosawa intermittent attention, almost exclusively recognizing him for his contributions to J-horror, with 1997’s Cure and 2001’s Pulse eating up the majority of their attention. Kurosawa has directed…
Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman, freely adapted from a Clive Barker short story, is the tale of a white academic who inadvertently summons a murderous ghost, textually a manifestation of racial violence against Black men, but simultaneously a commentary on the fear of their sexuality and the commodification…
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 blockbuster ATM: Er Rak Error. While he has yet to parlay that homegrown acclaim into larger international success, that might change with his latest…
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 that the world could do with more of. It also, unfortunately, realizes the kind of facile, lightweight logic all such binary idiocy is founded…
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 punching bag over the years, for reasons both understandable and absurd. The West End theater director and filmmaker received Oscar nominations for his first…
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 that often easily distinguishes it for international viewers. The escalating domestic box-office success of live-action manga adaptations is no exception, even if internationally, this…
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, lonely stretch of highway in the middle of the night. Cecilia (Mariana Anghileri) is on the run from someone, or something, with her young…
The Sadness Canadian director Rob Jabbaz shot The Sadness, his debut feature, in Taiwan, with a fully Taiwanese cast and script that draws in broad enough strokes to sidestep national or cultural specificity. Given the havoc that COVID-19 has wreaked on human civilization, it seems inevitable that we…
No Man of God works surprisingly well for a while, but fails to stick its schlocky landing. On the day before the official premiere of the latest Ted Bundy thriller No Man of God, director Amber Sealey received a scathing letter from true-crime enthusiast & fellow film director…
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 total of eleven nominations. I don’t want to say this is entirely because the once prestigious Taiwan-based festival, for decades the gold standard for…
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 with procedural details and a documentary-style immediacy. It’s mostly successful, although the diffuse narrative and sizable number of characters constantly threaten to get away…
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 uneasy position between narration and narrativization; its sweeping strokes complement and contradict personal undercurrents in equal measure, and it is frequently this unintentional dialectic…
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 rescued as a child from her native Vietnam by the hit-man Moody (Samuel L. Jackson), and then subsequently trained in his deadly arts, Anna…
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 that alchemy. Not merely because it’s both really scary and really funny, but because it constantly makes counterintuitive choices — in tone, in pacing,…
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 next internationally recognized auteur, with a style and tonal proclivity comparable to those of his aforementioned mentor’s. Though his previous film, 2018’s English-language To…
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 trendy hipster/bohemian lifestyle. Filled with live music venues, avant-garde theaters, cozy cafés, amiable hangout joints, clothing boutiques, and record shops, the rapidly-evolving Shimokitazawa offers…