In a city-state as vibrant and fast-paced as Singapore, the encroachment of work into various facets of social life appears inevitable, so much so that…
If stardom, traditionally, was a superhero who fought the bad guys and saved the world, then the fief of anonymity would fall to their unseen…
There is a good deal of sentimental value, both real and inflated, in Michael Kam’s The Old Man and His Car, most glaringly clued in…
The concert film documents the ecstasies of performance; the biopic narrativizes its painstaking preparations. In between these two modes stands the rehearsal film, capturing the…
A man has fallen: Argentine director Matías Szulanski’s A Summer Tale opens with a classic noir setup, one rendered gorgeously in Sunset Boulevard, Le Jour…
Misery isn’t a genre, but it’s a motif and an emotion that many independent and arthouse films seem to think is the defining state of…
Should war documentaries be fun? At the very least, we don’t expect them to be boring. It often feels like the whole genre is less…
“Life is cheesy sometimes,” says Liz (Valerie Pachner) in voiceover, moments before turning around at the airport and running back to embrace her lover, Ahmed…
If the sex comedy has become a rare breed in the two decades since its American Pie-to-Apatow heyday in the aughts, the marriage comedy, a…
Eugène Green’s The Tree of Knowledge offers us, in movie form, the sad spectacle of a man who insists on cracking jokes without realizing that…
Because all this writer knew about Wind, Talk to Me entering its screening had come from a couple of synoptical lines that mentioned a “family”…
There are movies we find undoubtedly bad — movies that get us worked up, that offend us, that ruin our day — but that at…
Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base…
François Ozon is a peculiar filmmaker. The French director’s output is as prolific (25 films in nearly 30 years) as it is full of odd…
Looking with a cynical eye, one might accuse Ildikó Eyendi — and not just in Silent Friend — of banality. The film’s three stories, taken…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes…
If you weren’t around to experience it in real time, it will be hard to grasp how seismic the 2002 FIFA World Cup feud between…
Elaborate, ephemeral, and exceedingly difficult to pull off, the souffle takes a serious amount of skill, experience, and precision to make, but typically takes just…
A moment of peculiar poignancy opens Erige Sehiri’s sensitive, if somewhat unremarkable, Promised Sky. A young girl is being bathed by three women as she…
There’s comfort on familiar terrain. The coming-of-age story has been a mainstay in storytelling across all media for as long as stories have been told;…
As far as the so-called Berlin School is concerned, the films of Ulrich Köhler have mostly led a somewhat peripheral existence — which is less…