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;…
In Johnnie To’s 2007 film Mad Detective, the eponymous cop is a gifted but troubled investigator who “sees” people’s inner personalities, which To visualizes by…
The end of the Edo period in Japan in 1867 was basically the end of the samurai era, and has, accordingly, been the inspiration for…
It might surprise Western viewers watching the raw portrait of youth in Snowball to learn that its writer/director Lee Woo-jung has spent the last decade…
New rom-com The Con-Heartist comes courtesy of director Mez Tharatorn, a filmmaker who made a name for himself in his native Thailand with 2012’s blockbuster…
Time, Ricky Ko’s debut feature after a decade of assistant directing, opens with its splashiest and most exciting sequence. Featuring a male and female assassin,…
In a bleak, post-Trump reality wherein nationalist hogwash has pervaded casual discourse, Yû Irie’s Ninja Girl reflects the kind of right-minded rhetoric that the world…
It’s probably unnecessary to note that Japanese (pop) culture, and more specifically its cinema today, has a sort of very vivid coolness and charm that…
Following the release of last year’s Blood Quantum, Rueben Martell’s Don’t Say Its Name is a welcome addition to the still-small genre of Indigenous horror.…
Daniel de la Vega’s On the Third Day, co-written by Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura, begins with three separate lives intersecting on a dark, lonely…
In its opening moments, The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill immediately establishes what Akira Sato (Junichi Okada), the assassin FKA Fable, can do and,…
The debut feature of New York-based filmmaker Oudai Kojima, Joint takes the structure of a rise-and-fall gangster picture and tries to imbue it with procedural…
A tepid sense of familiarity sets in while watching Glenn Chan’s feature debut Shadows. From its cold-open introductory murder to the perfunctory psychiatrist on a…
While fellow 2021 NYAFF entry Joint admirably (if ultimately unsuccessfully) attempts to reconfigure the Yakuza picture for a modern, 21st-century audience, Kazuya Shiraishi’s Last of…
Chen Yu-hsun’s My Missing Valentine swept the 2020 Golden Horse Awards, winning Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Editing, and Visual Effects out of a total…
Hotel Poseidon comes courtesy of Abattoir Ferme, a Belgian theater ensemble whose website characterizes the company’s voice as “provocative, physical, immersive, disturbing, highly visual, and…
Timur Bekmambetov’s Screenlife films have been a proven source of forward-thinking cinematic fun and big box office returns for a good many years now, with…
A former student of Michael Haneke’s, now operating under the Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion banner, Peter Brunner seems primed (and positioned) to be Austria’s next internationally…
For many depressing reasons, it’s not surprising to see a film like The River in competition at Locarno in 2021: it’s helmed by an artist…
Training for riots in blue and red gear, the police force, as depicted in Il Legionario, are made to look like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em…
The Sacred Spirit, Chema García Ibarra’s feature-length debut, asks a weighty and fitting question for these unstable times: Is there an unknown force in the…