In 2013, around the time that Stray Dogs had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Tsai Ming-liang announced his retirement from filmmaking. In the seven years since, he’s shown himself to be a rather active retiree, signing his name to no fewer…
Vampire Weekend were anachronistic from the moment they formed: clean-cut Ivy League youths writing exceptionally clear songs, both in terms of structure and recording clarity. Their first self-titled album officially dropped January of 2008, almost exactly one year before Animal Collective’s Merriwether Post Pavilion,…
The recently released High Life is perhaps the first film by septuagenarian Claire Denis with a plot fit for an elevator pitch: “Robert Pattinson fucks in space.” Of course, one doesn’t watch Denis’s sensuous, involuted films for their plots, which tend to be shattered…
It would be difficult to summarize the aesthetic of M. Night Shyamalan’s work of the past decade in one fell swoop, but there are a number of characteristics typical of his preoccupations which we can see as forming a link. He makes clear distinctions between…
Our Sunhi is the culmination of a cycle of Hong Sang-soo films, each starring actress Jung Yoomi, about aspiring women filmmaker with a weakness for strong drinks and a tendency to find themselves in the middle of love triangles between older and younger men. All the…
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is an exemplary minor film, shaped more by its incidental pleasures than any grand design. It owes much of its charm to actress Jung Eun-chae, as Haewon; Jung’s natural exuberance is used to energize Hong’s characterization of Haewon, who appears to…
Kevin Jerome Everson’s The Island of St. Matthews plays like something that might be unearthed in the furthest reaches of a “community films” search criteria, on some creative commons internet archive. With its unadorned 16mm footage and lack of contemporary signifiers, it’s strange to…
For a while, it seemed like 2013 had front-loaded its highlights; many films making our Top 20 either played the festival circuit in 2012 before finally getting their official theatrical runs Stateside (Like Someone in Love, Frances Ha, and our top pick) or they premiered…
As with the latest films by Manoel de Oliveira and — prior to his recent passing — Raul Ruiz, it’s tempting to digest a new film by the 91-year-old French director Alain Resnais as an all-encompassing swan song, a final testament on the filmmaker’s accumulated thoughts on cinema…