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…
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…
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…
An experimental documentary of modest means and sweeping scale, Chinese Portrait offers a scintillating snapshot of a rapidly changing nation. Director Wang Xiaoshuai assembled…
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…
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…
Suburban Birds opens with an iris shot, a formal gesture that likens it to Feng Xiaogang’s recent I Am Not Madame Bovary. Quickly, Qiu Sheng’s…
Two decades on now and Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become something of a genre unto himself. To those that concern themselves with film festivals and…
The American Western — usually identified by its action, machismo, and its oftentimes flimsy portrayal of Native American genocide — has also always dealt with borders.…
Theo Anthony’s Rat Film, which first premiered at Locarno in August, wastes no time in grabbing your attention, opening with voiceover about the beginning…
It’s hard to imagine French director Alain Guiraudie going for mainstream appeal, but if he did, the result might look something like Jérôme Reybaud’s…
“Everything disgusts me,” exclaims dying King Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The most disgusting thing present? The repulsive nature of aristocracy, laid out in full…
It would be a mistake to overstate the similarities between the events presented in Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan — a series of non-violent protests gone awry in…
Opening with a tableau of a woman dressed in red, standing over her kitchen sink with her back to the camera, Robert Greene’s (Kati…
Toward the end of Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, one of the film’s cast of circus performers botches a routine. As part of…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do…