Walk Up is Hong Sang-soo’s trickiest film since The Day After (2017), and his most intricately structured effort since The Day He Arrives (2012).…
Sable Island is a thin crescent of land (twenty-six miles long and less than a mile wide) located southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia. This…
The Novelist’s Film feels more diaristic than anything Hong has made before and results in what’s arguably his most emotive and personal film. One of…
Dos Estaciones is packed with precise images and lensed with beautiful attention to color and mise en scène, but it fails to satisfactorily develop its…
Cane Fire is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of white supremacy’s brutal legacy and a challenge to the enduring colonial myth of Kauaʻi. In the investigative documentary…
In Front of Your Face is a spiritual awakening of a film, tweaking Hong’s particular tenor from the past decade into something even more…
The Girl and the Spider is a bit of a symphony of sights and sounds that occasionally plays like too much of a recapitulation of…
Rock Bottom Riser is a work which regrettably shoehorns haptic political messaging into its otherwise incredible footage. Located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — a…
A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fascinating work of formal and intellectual hybridity. Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A…
Introduction bears a fitting title, as it feels like something distinctly new within Hong’s self-reflexive oeuvre. It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo,…
Expedition Content takes to task the supremacy of the visual in film, delivering a vibrant, versatile work of experimental ethnography. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition…
The Two Sights can get a bit bogged down in esoteric gobbledygook, but Bonnetta’s image-making and aural noodling make for a mostly compelling ethnographic work.…
Anne at 13,000 Ft. keeps its familiar portrait of an unraveling psyche fresh through its viscerality and opaque characterization. Anne at 13,000 Ft. only occasionally…
Isabella is another bold effort from Piñeiro, and a indication of the direction his particular art is headed. Isabella, the latest feature from Argentine…
499 boasts legitimate emotional weight, but undercuts its power with too much heavy-handed symbolism. Almost five centuries after the Spanish invasion of Mexico, a…
The Woman Who Ran continues Hong’s run of affecting personal exorcisms, here crafting a memorable protagonist who is equally mysterious and familiar. Hong Sang-soo’s excoriating…
Jia’s latest is a didactic, propogandist exercise, and something of a punctuating about-face from his best work. In a 2003 essay, Jia Zhangke —…
Un film dramatique is a well-intentioned study, but falls into something of a paternalistic trap in presentation. In general, films about childhood, pedagogy and…