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…
“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…
If the camera produces an impression of a visualizable and material reality, how can the apparatus of cinema stand in for an abstract and…
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…
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…
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 —…
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…
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…
The idea that cinema is dying, or perhaps already died, is certainly popular in a time when digital spectacle has all but consumed any…
A young woman from Tokyo finds herself in a strange town. In the beginning, she is looking for a tourist site, the ruins of…
“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 first feature from Chinese filmmaker Wu Lang, Absence shares a title and cast with the director’s second short film, which played at Cannes…
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)…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…