Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies…
To director Tommaso Santambrogio, to tell a story about people, you ought to tell the story of the places they inhabit. That could be why…
Analyzing a Wang Bing is never such a small feat, regardless of length; and Youth (Homecoming), the final entry in the director’s Youth trilogy, premiering…
No festival season rests complete without at least one recent opus by Filipino director Lav Diaz receiving due consideration, and Venice 2024 ensured this duty…
On the surface, Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s Alpha. falls into the trap set out by most contemporary European festival circuit films. It’s a movie…
The name most likely to catch the attention of cinephiles in the credits of Shahab Fotouhi’s first feature Boomerang is co-editor Aleksandre Koberidze, who broke…
A tasteless trend in movie marketing to reveal titles one letter at a time transitioned seamlessly into movie-making at some point in the last decade…
In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid…
In the opening scene of Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, the film introduces one of its two heroines in a hospital clinic: a young Italian…
Sadly, the title of Ariane Louis-Seize’s debut feature tells you virtually everything you need to know about the film itself. The Quebecois horror-comedy Humanist Vampire…
At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to the ultra-wealthy…
The Palace At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to…
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s The…
Víctor Iriarte’s Foremost by Night has more reputation behind it than its status as a first fiction feature would suggest. Alongside Iriarte’s resume, which includes…
In modernist art cinema, there has been a minor tradition of self-portrait films, and naturally they have been as different from one another as their…
2023 will surely go down in history as the year Ogawa An owned the international festival circuit. Okay, maybe not really, but Following the Sound…
Padre Pio Disclaimer: It’s important to acknowledge the severity of the accusations of abuse made against both Shia LaBeouf and Asia Argento, and clarify that…
Master Gardener In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging…
Reflection While Ukrainian writer/director Valentin Vasyanovych has been making films for a number of years, his breakthrough didn’t come until 2019’s Atlantis, which garnered awards…
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is famous for its portrayal of an inscrutable facial expression, that indelible half-smirk-half-smile that…
Night of the Kings Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to accept…