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 The…
Rock Bottom Riser is a work which regrettably shoehorns haptic political messaging into its otherwise incredible footage. Located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — a body…
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 Night…
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, so…
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 Content…
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. Filmed…
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 utilizes…
Isabella is another bold effort from Piñeiro, and a indication of the direction his particular art is headed. Isabella, the latest feature from Argentine writer-director…
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 lone…
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 relationship…
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 — now…
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 learning…
Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers. Film About A Father Who…
The long-standing theoretical association made between watching cinema and being in a dream-like state is one that’s rooted in a firm misunderstanding about the autonomy…
Yourself and Yours is a surreal, playful, and sometimes brilliant puzzle of a film from director Hong Sang-soo. In Yourself and Yours, we find Hong…
Liberté is gorgeous and confounding, a Brechtian presentation of passion, tedium and perversion. Albert Serra’s Liberté continues the director’s penchant for placing human rot, literal and metaphorical,…
I Was at Home, But… is an admirable but obnoxious examination of the nature of artifice. At right around the halfway mark of writer-director Angela Schanelec’s latest…
An experimental documentary of modest means and sweeping scale, Chinese Portrait offers a scintillating snapshot of a rapidly changing nation. Director Wang Xiaoshuai assembled the…
If José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia (2007) were reconceived as a contemporary gay drama, its opening might look something like the first…
The Wandering Soap Opera manages to create the perfect portrait of a nation without culture, without guidance, lost in a post-dictatorial haze. Filmed in 1990…