The best songs and albums released over the last 12 months found a way to subvert a hopeless political reality, to move and inspire us by striving for change. A Chinese rap group broke through to an international audience; a singer-songwriter sincerely mounted a mournful reflection on the…
Guillermo del Toro abandons his recent efforts at delivering alt-blockbusters and curating photography for interior design catalogs with The Shape of Water. A mute-mermaid romance set against a backdrop of Cold War-era espionage, del Toro’s latest showcases typically gorgeous production design that actually serves a purpose: the film…
Perhaps in answer to fans who complained that The Force Awakens was just a collection of rehashed elements and nostalgia with a shiny paint job, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, the might-be Empire Strikes Back of this new trilogy, is the most unusual and stealthily satisfying Star Wars-anything since at…
“YOU NEED TISSUES FOR YOUR ISSUES” reads a woman’s shirt near the start of Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind, the director’s second film from 2016, after the bubbly and earnest Lifeline. Or maybe what you really need, the film seems to suggest, is some good old-fashioned titillation: The woman,…
Ominous portents abound from the first moments of Joachim Trier’s Thelma: the film opens with the unsettling sight of a man pointing a hunting rifle at his daughter’s head. The man doesn’t pull the trigger, and whatever compelled him to consider doing so is left unexplained. In the next moment,…
Our fourth dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (here’s one, two, and three) includes the Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s docudrama The Rider, about South Dakotan rodeo culture; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Starman hybrid Before We Vanish; and Ben Russell’s Good Luck, a relatively normal (for him), 2.5 documentary about Surinamese gold…
In our second dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (the first is here), we take a look at the veteran Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s “quietly radical” Spoor; the contemporary political implications of “Berlin School” director Valeska Grisebech’s neo-western, Western; two black-and-white films about infidelity, Hong Sang-soo’s The Day After and Phillipe Garrel’s Lover…
Most seem to agree at this point that the Cannes Film Festival’s competition line-up was not good this year. While the New York Film Festival’s main slate includes more than a few of the same selections, the films that didn’t make the cut are especially noteworthy: Michael Haneke’s cynical,…
For our third and final dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s number one, here’s number two), we take a look at the film that caused(?) bomb threats at its Cannes premiere this year: Michel Hazanavicius’s nose-thumbing Jean-Luc Godard “biopic.” This dispatch also includes a couple of Canadian…
Gina (Lindsay Burdge), a flight attendant, hooks up with Jérôme (Damien Bonnard), a mustachioed bartender at a Parisian strip-club, after her husband commits suicide (a scene that’s drolly narrated by Anjelica Huston) in Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street. To Gina, Jérôme is a figure of fate, a man with “something in his eye,” as…
The fall film festival season is already in full swing, but the Toronto International Film Festival stands out due to its emphasis on commercialism, and its popularity with the general public. In fact, with each successive year (we’ve been attending since the mid-2000s), TIFF seems to increase its focus on celebrity and…
We have a lot planned for the fall film festival season—including multiple dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. But first, a modest precursor spotlighting five noteworthy titles that screened during the season’s initial Big Film Fest. Our sampling of the 2017 Venice International Film Festival (which wrapped…
Though Romanian director Cristi Puiu sets his latest film, Sieranevada, at a family gathering commemorating the death of a late patriarch, the filmmaker has much more on his mind than simple grief. Taking place soon after the attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices and bringing together communists, conservatives, adulterers…
Shingo Matsumura’s Love and Goodbye and Hawaii is a rare gem, an off-beat light comedy about young people that is neither cute nor contrived, founded in a reality unadorned by screenwriterly gimmicks. Rinko (Aya Ayano), a young woman a few years out of college, lives with her ex-boyfriend/best…
Marking French writer-director Jean-Gabriel Periot’s first step into fiction filmmaking (after a string of documentaries), Summer Lights opens, fittingly, with a simple, sustained talking-head interview. “That summer was especially hot…” begins Mrs. Takeda as she recalls the moments leading up to the Hiroshima bombing, which she and her…
In The Great Passage—a film for which Yûya Ishii won Best Director from both the Japanese Academy Awards and Kinema Junpo—the decades-long story of dictionary writers was told with a slow, patient accumulation of detail, lives and loves built out of the tiniest of gestures and moments. In adapting…
Although widely dismissed during its initial premiere, Daguerrotype, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first French-language production, finds the Japanese genre master in peak form; the first hour alone fulfills the promise of the director’s formal rigor being transposed to a ghost story in the French countryside. Jean (Tahar Rahim, superb), a…
Japan Cuts—the largest screening event for new Japanese films in North America—just wrapped its 11th annual edition this week. Our one and only dispatch from the fest this year includes new films from the auteurs Sion Sono (ANTIPORNO) and Kiyoshi Kuroawa (Daguerrotype); respected but lesser known directors like Nobuhiro Yamashita (Over…
Nikkatsu is in the process of rolling out a new crop of “romantic pornography” (or Roman Porno) films—a throwback to their heyday in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the studio went “pink” in an effort to compete with television. As then, the only real guiding precept is that…
An action-comedy in the jiangshi (hopping vampire) tradition, Vampire Cleanup Department concerns Tim (Babyjohn Choi), a nerdy loner who is bitten on the ass by a vampire and subsequently recruited by his rescuers, the clandestine government agency from which the film takes its title. On his first real…
The 16th annual New York Asian Film Festival recently ended its two-week run. We’ve already published two dispatches from the fest—for our third and final one, we have a few quick-takes on some exciting new Japanese films, including another entry in Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno reboot (Isao Yukisada’s Aroused by Gymnopedies), a project which we wrote about…