Set in a small Balkan town still reeling from a tragic factory fire several years earlier, Mladen Djordjevic’s Working Class Goes to Hell finds a…
Sometimes people die for no reason, and that a tragedy can be so banal makes it all the more incomprehensible. This is what the immigrant…
Looking over the 25 years’ worth of productions by French-Canadian auteur Denis Côté, one discerns a kind of creative restlessness. Not only is Côté a…
“The real problem [or] the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the…
At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to the ultra-wealthy…
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s The…
Víctor Iriarte’s Foremost by Night has more reputation behind it than its status as a first fiction feature would suggest. Alongside Iriarte’s resume, which includes…
In modernist art cinema, there has been a minor tradition of self-portrait films, and naturally they have been as different from one another as their…
2023 will surely go down in history as the year Ogawa An owned the international festival circuit. Okay, maybe not really, but Following the Sound…
As yet another Hong Sang-soo project makes the rounds, surely to be followed in four to six months by another, even newer film, it’s worth…
Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s lo-fi, low-key films seem to be increasing in ubiquity as reference points for young filmmakers. Nelson Yeo’s Dreaming & Dying initially…
Director Yamaguchi Junta’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was a delightful no-budget time travel comedy that hit the scene a couple of years ago, delighting…
Allegedly an “experimental” video essay/documentary on the history of the doorbell, director Graeme Arnfield’s Home Invasion purports to be an unsettling and insightful exploration of…
One of Fantasia’s 2023 archival presentations is Jeong Jae-eun’s 2001 coming-of-age ensemble film Take Care of My Cat. The movie was a critical hit when…
The programmers at the Fantasia International Film Festival can be counted on, year after year, to assemble a strong lineup of retrospective screenings, from new…
French documentarian and academic Sylvain George has been making a particular kind of film for nearly twenty years, carving out a specific cinematic niche. In…
Writing about Larry Fessenden’s new film Blackout, recently screened as part of the Fantasia Film Festival, we commented on its “shaggy structure” and noted that…
One or two festivals ago, who can remember which — this time of year they all blend together — this critic wrote about Nomad, Patrick…
One of the finest films of the Hong Kong New Wave, Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982), plays at this year’s NYAFF in a new restoration, advertised…
“Gang gang.” “Ice cream so good.” You can listen to these words while buttering toast (the voice belongs to Pinkydoll). You can gamble online while…
Redemption With Life is a story of corruption and redemption — a “classic” rise and fall tale set within the anodyne world of finance and…