It’s low on the list of 21st century horrors, but there’s something uniquely off-putting about watching a self-recorded video of someone crying. It’s tough to…
Jonathan Rosenbaum included an anecdote on Paul Schrader when writing about the revival of Robert Bresson’s first feature, Les Affaires Publiques (1934). As always, Schrader…
Even when Jorge Luis Borges wrote screenplays, they weren’t necessarily “Borgesian” — not, that is, distilled into the particular pleasure of following one of Borges’…
Long takes involving medium-to-wide shots of landscapes have nearly cemented themselves as festival-cinema staples, so it’s not surprising to see an IFFR Tiger competition film,…
Fuori, the latest film by Italy’s Mario Martone (Nostalgia, The King of Laughter), is curiously inert, especially when you consider that most of the film…
If you like Bone Tomahawk, Lucio Fulci’s Conquest, samurai poetry, and Yayan Ruhian being cool as hell, then there’s a new movie just screaming your…
Time is an amazing thing. It eludes us as we write, as we speak, read, and breathe, confounding us even more when things don’t follow…
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson No one seems to enjoy the world we…
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…