At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, Sébastien Pilote’s traditional treatment of Louis Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine is a headline for all the…
There’s nothing particularly novel about Oleg Sentsov’s Rhino, a rise-and-fall gangster narrative about a Ukrainian tough guy who carves a bloody swath through his enemies…
To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth; it’s hard to deny in exemplars of the…
The Judith Butler quote (from Dispossession) that opens Jun Li’s Drifting serves as a neat entry point: “Such bodies both perform the conditions of life…
One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction of images and experiences…
Stanley Kwan has never achieved the same level of critical renown here in America as his countryman Wong Kar-wai, which seems most certainly in large…
Tracing Her Shadow, the third feature by Song Pengfei (whose films are credited to just his given name), deals with a relatively little-known historical tragedy:…
The collective known as the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers – who have two of their films at this year’s CineCina Film Festival – accounts for,…
As an authentic example of guerilla filmmaking (with its roots in independent rebellion, rather than serving as an Escape From Tomorrow-esque marketing ploy), Sad Film…
“It’s your show I’m cancelling, not you,” remarks one character to another in The Accusation, encapsulating, intentionally or otherwise, the thorny politics at the heart…
Capitalizing on the considerable reputation he’s earned himself at the big international film festivals over the last few years, Radu Jude heads into this new…
Shinya Tsukamoto: unapologetic termite artist, jack of all cinematic trades — besides merely directing all of his feature-length freak shows, he also writes, produces, shoots,…
From a certain perspective, there are two types of Takashi Miike movies. The director has worked in more genres across a greater number of films…
They’re called “silent movies,” but for the most part, films preceding the advent of cinema sound recording weren’t really silent. Though there wasn’t on-screen dialog,…
Malaysia-born, Osaka-based director, and self-described “cinema drifter” Kah Wai Lim has previously made films in his native Malaysia, Hong Kong, Osaka, Croatia, and Slovenia, quietly…
Having first reached the festival circuit in December 2020 at the Cairo International Film Festival, the Mainland Chinese entry for competition at this year’s NYAFF…
Filipino romantic drama Here and There opens with feisty heroine Len (Janine Gutierrez) engaging in an online war of words with the earnest and handsome…
In Barbarian Invasion, retired actress Moon Lee (Tan Chui Mui, who also directs), not to be confused with actual retired martial arts actress Moon Lee,…
Nearly a decade after his previous feature, the 2012 big-budget disaster movie tentpole The Tower — South Korea’s very belated answer to The Towering Inferno…
Given our TikTok-conditioned attention spans, it’s not hard to imagine a future where movies are eventually whittled down to a mere 5 seconds, with minute-long…
Filmmakers Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo interpret the title of their new essayistic documentary Double Layered Town/Making a Song to Replace Our Position very literally;…