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 distorted— and demand empathetic viewing. Each film offers a study of imperfect people acting imperfectly, daring the audience to offer alternative courses to their…
The 41st Toronto International Film Festival recently wrapped, and our writers were on hand to soak up the cinema bounty. Our first of two dispatches includes hotly anticipated fall releases like Denis Villeneuve’s mysterious sci-fi film Arrival and Barry Jenkins’s decades-spanning character study Moonlight; holdovers from the competition lineup of…
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 high-concept comedy about a group of virgins who are bestowed fantastical abilities mixes the supernatural with frank illustrations of sex and desire, and while…
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 his unabashed revelry in exhibitionism and voyeurism. It was filmed back in the mid-’90s, way before Sono’s breakout Suicide Club, and not finished until after…
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 categorized as a fairly typical minimalist art film, and his Suicide Club firmly entrenched itself in the millennial wave of Japanese horror, Love Exposure is much less…
Suicide Club opens with a montage of the city at night: documentary realist footage of pedestrians moving through Tokyo, on and off of trains and through stations, is scored to a peppy martial beat. Then, in a dreadful instant, the familiar tropes of the city symphony turn to…
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 this premise. Today, the battle-of-the-sexes set-up would likely lead the director to make a polished film of outsized violence and exuberant melodrama, as invested in…
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 word “love.” The best of these, and indeed the 54-year-old Japanese iconoclast’s masterpiece-to-date, is 2011’s Love Exposure, a four-hour exorcism of acrimonious attitudes toward his country’s…
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 comedy from Ryosuke Hashiguchi and a 1982 cyberpunk watershed from Sogo Ishii (both of which played as part of the “classics” sidebar); Masao Adachi’s latest political provocation
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 and introspective melodrama. Previous installments have reduced the relationship between Ip and his most famous student, Bruce Lee, to little more than a cursory…
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 comedy belying a search for deeper meaning. Josh Brolin stars as Harry Mannix, head of production and fixer for Capitol Studios (certainly not coincidentally the same…
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 the past. Innovation is an organic byproduct of any artform, but so is adherence to a certain classicism, and 2015 was particularly emblematic of…
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 lockstep with their respective films in ways that less impactful ones don’t, but in these cases sometimes that means our love of a given…
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. Kanye, Rihanna, Drake, Frank Ocean, there were even Beyoncé rumors for awhile—none showed up to the album party, and in retrospect it’s not hard…
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 EP cover the extent of music that mattered to you in 2015, which hey, we feel you), but we’re hoping to rectify this in…
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 that’s been sitting and collecting dust for years, an appropriate matching of form and function. Shot on grainy 16mm, director Todd Haynes prefers a…
The biggest surprise of Brooklyn is how determinedly sweet it remains to the end, its period vibrancy bordering on the genteel. In navigating the push-pull narrative of Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), a young Irish girl who relocates to New York in the early ’50s, director John Crowley leaves little doubt as to what’s in…
One of the brainiest guys in jazz, Brad Mehldau is likened to classical composers as often as he is boppin’ piano men; he is famous for his heady liner notes, and nearly everything he does comes with a conceptual thrust. So if Brad Mehldau is going to make…
After surviving multiple rounds of teenage gladiatorial combat, inadvertently inciting an armed uprising, and becoming a media darling and symbol for revolt against a tyrannical dictatorship, Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, but you knew that) is tired of all the killing. But when the leader of…
The re-emergence of the culinary arts as part of the zeitgeist has been an evolving narrative for the past decade, most noticeably found on the small screen with fully-dedicated cable channels and network reality shows. Burnt banks on this built-in relevancy and familiarity in telling the story of…
Guillermo del Toro’s sympathies have always been with his orphan, discarded monsters: the aging vampire in Cronos, the beautiful, malevolent creatures of Pan’s Labyrinth, or the dying fairy kingdom of Hellboy II. They may be cruel and violent but they are also irreparably misunderstood, tragically separate from us, forever unloved, forced…