Representation does not equal inclusion. With ostensibly good intentions and plenty of compassion, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s attempt at telling the story of refugee…
The inline skate is a useful metaphor for the life of Alex (Ani Mesa-Perez), the young woman on the cusp of adulthood in Erin Vassilopoulos’…
The aesthetics of liminality, arising from online images and storytelling revolving around emptied public spaces and mediated encounters with the uncanny, have lately penetrated cinema.…
In his most recent short The Wind, One Brilliant Day, Ben Rivers takes on a poem-in-translation by the Spanish modernismo writer Antonio Machado, né Antonio…
For introverts and the unaccomplished, the greatest threat looming over every family gathering isn’t the unlikely prospect of mass violence, but an all too conscious…
It’s all too easy to feel at home in Casey Walker’s Home Bodies. Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho) have lived all their days in…
Akira Nagai’s Suzuki=Bakudan is a police procedural in which nearly every consequential movement begins with a man sitting at a table. Tagosaku Suzuki (Jiro Sato),…
Canadian perversion has always held a firm grip on our self-narrativization, the violent alienation of our national identities always sought after in reconciliation. Most often,…
There is something about horror maestro Takashi Shimizu’s The Mouths that feels as foundational as myth. The film’s premise is simple enough: a group of university-aged…
At best, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter can be described as well-intentioned. Critically, however, it is existentially foolhardy and morally naive. Carrying a juvenile sort…
In Mark H. Rapaport’s Godhead, the world would seem to start and end between the walls of the church. In fact, this specific church commands…
Kasper Kalle’s No Rest for the Wicked is, on the face of it, dark and grim; apt, for a vampire horror with Gothic sensibilities. The film,…
Corpus opens tantalizingly, with a modeling session in which apparently inexperienced Wren (Nuha Jes Izman) is being photographed by veteran Billie (Lily Cowles). This being…
Watching Peter Hengl’s mid-length film The Fated Hour feels like handling a delicate porcelain doll: a precious encounter with a time-worn magic. The film, commissioned…
Australian writer-director Alice Maio Mackay is not quite 22 years old, and now has seven feature-length productions under her belt. But there’s often a downside…
The following statement about Alan Resnick’s first feature, Dance Freak, can easily be misconstrued as a fault on the film, an accusation of artistic counterfeit.…
In Los Vampires, director Craig Mitchell draws on the parallel production of Universal’s two 1931 Dracula films, then gradually lets that industrial history go magnificently…
Latvian cinema, and especially animation, has been under either a spotlight or a microscope, depending on the vantage point, since Flow took home the country’s…
Beyond that upper tier of ubiquitous classics like Ring, Ju-On, Audition, and Pulse, Kōji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse has cemented itself as a “you’ve gotta…
Released in 2012, Leung Lok-man & Sunny Luk Kim-Ching’s Cold War became a gargantuan commercial smash and critical success, breaking domestic box office records and…
It’s the summer of 1994, and a P.I. by the name of Yonemoto (Jiro Sato) has been found brutally beaten and stabbed to death in…