Like many films gunning to establish an immediately serious tone, Angga Dwimas Sasongko’s 13 Bombs begins with sobering news reports. One newscaster outlines Indonesia’s slow…
The syntactically redundant title of Tomonari Nishikawa’s latest film provides a subtle hint as to what the filmmaker is up to. If one watches the…
The interaction between documenting the act of filmmaking and the final film as a meaning-making document for the filmmaker, subject, and spectator is a staple…
France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary…
The subject of the poets and poetry of Hong Kong is a natural for Ann Hui, always the most literarily inclined of the great directors…
Pablo Marín’s cinema can be deceptively simple and deceptively complex. Having worked exclusively on 8 and 16mm celluloid, the Argentinian filmmaker has gravitated, as with…
Imagine Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter — a devastating, years-long descent of a small town in the aftermath of a communal tragedy that traces grief…
For the past several years, Leonardo Pirondi has created a fascinating body of experimental works that play with fictional documentary frameworks to produce complex layers…
Antoinetta Angelidi’s filmography is composed of five films across five decades, stretching back to Idées Fixes/Dies Irae in 1977. Over the subsequent half century, Greece’s…
In his new short film, Rainer Kohlberger proposes the titular electric kiss as an ultimate pleasure, a literal sum of the neural impulses that produce…
The recent construction of the $217 million Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, confirmed by Hindu mythology as Shri Ram’s birthplace in India, and the ruling right-wing…
For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known to modern…
The rare Shinya Tsukamoto film to not star the director himself, Shadow of Fire is his third consecutive period piece, following Fires on the Plain…
In his books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze draws a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image is concerned with linear…
Fabio D’Orta’s The Complex Forms opens with a long pan over a burning car, set to an audacious classical piece, that slowly flips 180 degrees…
Pete Ohs’ amiably idiosyncratic new feature Love and Work is set in a future where jobs are illegal. It begins with Diane (Stephanie Hunt, also…
What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of realism.…
The worst thing a film — or any other form of art — can do is work too hard to be about something. This is…
Desire Lines is a hybrid film that understands the themes it wants to address, but struggles to find the formal means. Part conventional talking heads…
With its title referring to the scar left behind by a suicidal person who hesitates and fails to deliver a mortal wound, Selman Nacar’s Hesitation…