Anyone who follows any artform closely — in this case, cinema, but it’s equally true for music, painting, sculpture, literature, what have you — knows…
Post-apocalyptic visions in mainstream cinema usually serve a practical, introductory function, providing a digestible dose of world-building before plunging the audience into the crux of…
In Miguel Llansó’s latest, three young women fall under the strange spell of Dr. Mindfulness, whom they meet on a virtual reality dating app and…
It has become a somewhat common tactic for documentary filmmakers in the digital age to turn to the supercut as a way to sift through…
Horror and comedy share much in common. Both are affect-driven genres that hinge on build-up and release while helping us navigate through cultural taboos. For…
In her 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin grapples with the aftermath of a near-fatal bear attack in the…
Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival…
Norris Wong’s first feature film, My Prince Edward, was one of the better Hong Kong indie movies of recent years. It starred singer/actress Stephy Tang…
“In the end, they swallowed up the nation as a whole.” The last lines of the epilogue intertitle of Kim Sung-soo’s 12:12: The Day roll…
The A24ification of world cinema continues apace with Brief History of a Family, a dreary Chinese genre exercise that premiered earlier this year at Sundance.…
In his cryptic new film Whale Bones, Takamasa Oe attempts a “how we live now” exploration of disaffected youth and the aimless ennui of modern…
Passion projects like Kubi almost always deserve greater appreciation and more careful interest than a mere evaluation of their qualitative values can merit. Takeshi Kitano…
With enough practice, seemingly anything can become normal, even the working practice of Shunji Iwai. For the better part of his career, Iwai’s melodramas of…
Upon initial release in 2016, Shin Godzilla — the product of co-directors Hideaki Anno (creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi (storyboard/SFX artist) —…
The clean and well-organized business environs of Sho Miyake’s All the Long Nights seem to come straight from the catalogue; the city skyline casts an…
Parables, as with social satires, have been considered both ripe for adaptation and stubbornly resistant to reinterpretation; although Kafka and Orwell have seen their fair…
Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and beguiling, inventive narrative structures…
The depictions of early adulthood in cinema have, until recently, been characterized by an odd, dizzying sensation: portraying it as a period where one’s life…
Beatrice Gibson’s short film Leisure, Utopic is the first in a series of “loose adaptations” of Bernadette Mayer’s book-length poem, Utopia. The film features the…
Metafiction as a reclamation of the historical and a confrontation of the contemporary malaise, built up across international political discourses of pervading neoconservatism, urgently addressing…
What is the difference between a filmmaker and a filmer? Watching archival films assembled from home movies, it’s difficult to escape the long shadow of…