There’s one very well-executed scene in mainland Chinese indie director Geng Jun’s Manchurian Tiger: Ma Qianli (Jun regular Zhang Zhiyong), a one-time-successful real estate mogul…
Fifty years ago, Chen Kuan-tai stepped out from the background as an extra and stuntman in Chang Cheh’s stock company to take the lead role…
A wealthy man is deemed the prime suspect in the murder of a young woman after he is found in a hotel room with her…
It goes without saying that Japanese anime is a permanent part of the international cinephilic sphere. There are many reasons why the appeal and success…
One of the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival’s archival presentations is the new restoration of Wong Jing’s 1982 film Mercenaries from Hong Kong. Already here at…
Mickey Reece’s Country Gold also stars the director as country music artist Troyal Brux (clearly modeled, at least visually, on Garth Brooks, whom Reece vaguely…
Yoon Seo-jin’s debut feature Chorokbam opens ominously. After an aging nightwatchman (Lee Tae-hoon) investigates the loud meowing he overhears, he makes a grisly discovery on…
In some respects, My Small Land is a film about easily perceived material differences. Sarya (Lina Arashi) holds herself at a distance from others; she…
Daigo Matsui’s Just Remembering features two characters who love Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. At least, they love the first section and, specifically, Winona Ryder’s…
Things have been building to this moment for a while, but ever since films like Julia Ducournau’s Raw crossed over to find a mainstream audience…
A dark night of the soul that gradually metastasizes into a howl of impotent anger at life itself, Mitchell Stafiej’s The Diabetic follows 30-something Alek…
The Mole Song: Final is the third and, well, final part of Takashi Miike’s Mole Song series about an undercover cop infiltrating the yakuza. It…
Edward Yang’s 1986 film Terrorizers is an opaque, elliptical portrait of overwhelming ennui in a then modern-day Taipei, and one of the earliest examples of…
Jeong Ga-young has spent the past several years carving out a space for herself on the fringes of the international festival circuit with films like…
Nounen Rena (Credited as Non) returns with her sophomore feature, writing, directing, and starring in Ribbon, a coming-of-age, Covid-set communion with the precipitate anxieties that…
Taiwanese-American filmmaker Arvin Chen’s previous two features, Au Revoir Taipei (2010) and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (2013), are light, bubbly, visually vibrant variations…
Mathieu Amalric has inarguably built up a CV of highly visible appearances over the past two decades, so much so that he’s comparable to fellow…
When Jean-Luc Godard launched the experimental Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1968, one of their primary concerns involved creating radical texts that eschewed…
Andrew Infante’s Ferny & Luca is a first feature with a lot of places to get to. It briskly orbits around romantic ideas and images,…
It may be a hasty judgment, but as soon as we see a young woman painting on a canvas, smoking a cigarette positioned in the…
A coming-of-age story about a sensitive, artistically-minded young man with filmmaking aspirations sounds like a recipe for mawkish solipsism, so it’s nothing short of a…