Coming just two weeks after the end of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival, the 35th Vancouver International Film Festival (September 29th – October 14th)…
At the start of American Honey, Jake and Star, its two lead characters (played by Shia LeBeouf and newcomer Sasha Lane, respectively) meet and…
The 41st Toronto International Film Festival recently wrapped, and our writers were on hand to soak up the cinema bounty. Our second and final…
Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman and Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation navigate similar thematic territory—that of patriarchs finding their ethical boundaries pushed when their self-perceived altruistic defense of family becomes…
The 41st Toronto International Film Festival recently wrapped, and our writers were on hand to soak up the cinema bounty. Our first of two…
Sion Sono’s The Virgin Psychics is one strange movie, though not for the reasons his films are usually strange. True to its title, this…
Despite its 2012 release, Bad Film captures a Sion Sono before he reached international acclaim; before his particular brand of otaku-influenced action films; and before…
Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an epic, four-hour romantic comedy about terrible fathers, upskirt photography, Catholicism, and the meaning of love. Where Sono’s Bicycle Sighs could be…
Suicide Club opens with a montage of the city at night: documentary realist footage of pedestrians moving through Tokyo, on and off of trains…
Watching his 1988 film Decisive Match! Girls Dorm Against Boys Dorm, it’s hard not to imagine what a post-Suicide Club Sion Sono would do with…
Sion Sono, known to most as a director of brutally violent films like 2002’s Suicide Club, can claim at least three titles in his filmography that contain the…
The 10th anniversary edition of Japan Cuts, North America’s largest festival for new Japanese film, wrapped this past weekend. Our third and final dispatch features a 2002 romantic…
The most admirable aspect of Wilson Yip’s Ip Man movies is their disinterest in typical biopic aspirations. Instead these films favor strong martial arts action…
Sticking to a reliable and remarkably elastic formula, the Coen brothers’ 1950s Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! is, like Burn After Reading or Raising Arizona, another deceptively fluffy screwball…
A typical year spent traversing the cinematic landscape results in straddling some kind of line: one foot confidently marches off into the future while the other remains firmly planted in…
Evaluating performances is such a deeply subjective endeavor that finding a meaningful consensus can often feel like an impossibility. Truly extraordinary ones tend to work in…
This was the year when the biggest artists on the planet spent more time than anyone’s patience would allow teasing albums that never came.…
It’s true, we didn’t really cover music all that extensively in 2015 (unless reviews of a 10-disc set of live Brad Mehldau material and a 4Minute…
Like someone’s old love letters or the keepsake wilted flowers of a first love, Carol has the feel of a kind of attic picture…