It’s arguably a Sisyphean task to adapt Henry James’ late work to the screen, and in particular his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle.…
“Art is for keeps,” the protagonist of Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside proclaims, just shortly before finding himself condemned to an art-laden torture chamber. Played by Willem…
If the camera produces an impression of a visualizable and material reality, how can the apparatus of cinema stand in for an abstract and intangible…
Premiering in Berlinale Forum, a space reserved for “test[ing] the boundaries of convention,” Yoo Heong-jun’s Regardless of Us will inevitably elicit comparisons with the works…
Images fade in and out, they flicker and repeat as metallic crashing and analog distortion echo from a distance. Lei Lei’s fragmentary short, That Day,…
In João Canijo’s Berlinale competition film Bad Living, long shots are composed so precisely that their motivations frequently don’t become clear for minutes — often…
Since moving from 16mm to digital nearly fifteen years ago, James Benning’s films have become more and more stringent, foregoing surface incident in favor of…
Subtlety isn’t Singaporean cinema’s strong suit, as year after year of mainstream slop, indie darlings, and enfant terrible flops (having largely been banned back home)…
The idea that cinema is dying, or perhaps already died, is certainly popular in a time when digital spectacle has all but consumed any other…
A young woman from Tokyo finds herself in a strange town. In the beginning, she is looking for a tourist site, the ruins of an…
“I have a secret life. You’re looking at me but what you see is not what I am.” Who was Donna Summer? This is the…
The first feature from Chinese filmmaker Wu Lang, Absence shares a title and cast with the director’s second short film, which played at Cannes in…
There is little build-up to the opening of Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s latest thriller, #Manhole. Within the first five minutes, unfortunate salesman Shunsuke Kawamura (Yûto Nakajima) awakes…
The Novelist’s Film One of the most pleasurable ways to engage with a Hong Sang-soo film is to consider the similarities and differences between each…
Coma There have been a number of “lockdown movies” since the outbreak of Covid, and most of them have been unfortunate affairs. While it’s true…
Rimini The curtain doesn’t quite fall in wintry Rimini, this latest nondescript and non-place in life’s long march toward certain death. In Ulrich Seidl’s latest…
Petite Maman Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed on a precipice of some essential awareness, riding the ebbs and flows of emerging self-knowledge, and arriving…
Bloodsuckers In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori…
Social Hygiene Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly…
Introduction It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so often noted for his diptych structures, seems to have moved into a new triptych phase…
Nous Cutting across Paris from the north to the south, the RER B is a commuter rail that shuttles passengers to and from the city…