Whether they be achieved formally, thematically, or even sonically, few filmmakers are capable of pulling off a myriad of genres like that of impossibly dexterous…
Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 romantic drama, premiered at that year’s Cannes Film Festival where it received a rather muted response, even from admirers of…
The great director Paul W.S. Anderson expressed irritation in his commentary track on Alien vs. Predator (2004) to the common descriptor used to label films…
When was the last time you visited a foreign city and didn’t look up things to do? Didn’t crowd-source recommendations, rely on offline maps and…
Following the success and acclaim of his reality-bending 1997 directorial debut Perfect Blue — a feverish take on the Giallo genre, filtered through a ’90s…
What’s in a name? Over the length of an intimidatingly monumental career, Seijun Suzuki gave us titles of great and peculiar beauty: Take Aim at…
“The place? New York City. The time? Now: 1962. And there’s no time or place like it.” Down With Love, Peyton Reed’s 2003 technicolor pastiche…
Since his breakout 1997 film Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke has emerged as one of the most gifted artists chronicling life in 21st-century China. Three of…
In an era when any slob with a next-day delivery synth can create bleep-bloops in their bedroom and go viral overnight, the musical and technological…
When Eazy-E departed our earthly realm, he left behind not just his own substantial body of work, but an entire, still-thriving record label with a…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only…
In 2003’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang’s gentle ode to cinema, the Taiwanese director’s famously steady camera trains on a handful of moviegoers catching a…
Purple Butterfly is a film of dreamy realism, sometimes insoluble and suffused with a haze that is, at once, sepulchral yet sultry — a film about…
Even in his earlier, more relatively conventional films, Abbas Kiarostami always maintained an eye for radical formal experimentation. Close Up, for instance, is as much…
In an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Abbas Kiarostami recited a verse from the poet Rumi: “You are my polo ball, running before…