Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough, in Paris. However, the grand romanticism that usually marks such stories is replaced here by a grimly repetitive pattern of lust and violence…
Lou Ye’s Summer Palace is an exasperating experience, full of interesting ideas and an incendiary political backdrop but falling victim to clichés of poeticized romantic longing. Though not a new idea, conflating the political and the personal can be an interesting way to explore how people living through historically…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a kind of ceaseless struggle. Indeed, the film itself feels practically willed into existence, exhibiting a preponderance of brash style and a boundless (though…
After a first encounter, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye seemed ripe for being written off as a Wong Kar-wai copycat — at best an adept craftsman of soft-focus, woozily shot images of beautiful men and women, bathed in shadow, moving kinetically through rain-streaked city streets. The film that suggested…
Luther Dickinson has spent more than 30 years as a session player, singer/songwriter, record producer, and ringleader of the North Mississippi All Stars — so by now, he’s accumulated a contact list that would be the envy of anyone in roots-rock. He leverages his community to noble effect…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition of ‘country’ to incorporate all the permutations that the genre has opened itself up to, especially in recent years. We feel that there…
There are a couple of ways to apprehend Mule Variations, the twelfth studio album from Tom Waits and the second to be co-written almost entirely by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. Skeptics might say it’s Waits-by-the-numbers, the closest he’s ever come to formula or repetition. Then again, it’s…
In 1987, Margaret Thatcher made her infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society” in order to espouse her doctrine of methodological individualism. Well, if the specter of Thatcher looms large over Naked, then it seems only natural that most of its characters should be atoms adrift —…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
It feels pointed that the segment in Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s checkered timeline that forms its romantic core is set in the year 2000, which is when In the Mood for Love premiered. Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece forms the most obvious touchstone for the more swooning sections of Bi Gan’s likewise color-coded…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a schlubby, mildly irresponsible beardo played by Seth Rogen manages to get an ambitious, beautiful woman to fall in love with him. Hijinks ensue. The problem with Long Shot is less that this is an already well-worn idea, or even…
Billed as “the first Indian film to be shot inside a single room,” Dhayam proves that some ideas are so inane that just maybe they aren’t enough to sustain a film. (In any case, there are multiple shots used throughout Dhayam involving the cast walking into said ‘single…
As a title, Hell Like Heaven serves to explain the clashing contradictions that bring about the joys in The Peggies’ music. The Japanese trio’s buzzing, jagged alt-rock riffs are virtually hot to the touch, while their lyrics deal with the soft, almost cheesy expressions of love — and…
In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched some monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is Foreign Correspondent, a survey of new releases from the international music world — which, going forward, will now be published bimonthly. The latest issue…
In Dario Argento’s Deep Red, the piercing visions of a Jewish-German telepath (Macha Méril) serve as an embodiment of this Italian master’s worldview: to look is to know, and to know is to feel. As in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up before it, a murder (here it’s Méril’s imperilled seer) drives the wanderings of…
Chinese cinema is now deep into its latest movement, its 8th Wave. But this moment is a conflicted one, as intensely contradictory as Chinese existence itself — and its cinema seems self-conscious of this. In titles as disparate as Guo Jingming’s Tiny Times and Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, one can see refracted kernels of…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
Suburban Birds opens with an iris shot, a formal gesture that likens it to Feng Xiaogang’s recent I Am Not Madame Bovary. Quickly, Qiu Sheng’s film reveals this to be the POV of a land surveyor looking through his theodolite. In its first half, the film is composed mostly…
The 48th edition of New Directors/New Films runs March 27th – April 7th. Here’s our first dispatch. Included — very much intentionally — in our second and final dispatch from the fest is a film that isn’t actually playing the fest at all, at least not anymore. The exact reasons…
The 48th edition of New Directors/New Films runs March 27th – April 7th. For our first of two dispatches, we tackle the second feature from Canadian filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis); a “deceptively minimalist” debut from a Mexican actress-turned-filmmaker (The Chambermaid); a Turkish love story spun on its head (Belonging); and others.…
Modestly assembled and expertly executed, David Wenham’s delightful debut feature Ellipsis conjures those occasions when human connection comes calling, often in spite of some general apathy. Employing a style of narrative popularized by Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, the actor-turned-director’s serendipitous romance is the story of