Depiction of extreme pain is not the most distressing thing about Finnish BDSM comedy Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. Frequent scenes of a dominatrix strangling…
With Resin, director Daniel Borgman explores the beauty and the terror of escaping a dysfunctional society and returning to something more simplistic. The film…
With the distinct air of an artist desperate to cobble together a personal story out of some old rusty parts, III is a film…
Elia Suleiman: actor, director, “citizen of the world.” It Must Be Heaven follows Suleiman as he journeys from his native Palestine to Paris, and then to…
Much like its titular character, Pablo Larain’s Ema is a bit of an enigma: a seemingly complex character study that offers little in the…
Nina Hoss is an absolute treasure, one of the great actresses of contemporary cinema; her collaborations with Christian Petzold produced some of the decade’s…
On paper, Hakota Yuko’s debut feature, Blue Hour, has much promise. The film was inspired, in some measure or another, by Isao Takahata Studio Ghibli…
Hiroshi Okuyama’s debut feature, Jesus, displays impressive technical mastery; besides writing and directing, the filmmaker served as cinematographer and editor. The academy ratio framing, combined…
Sayaka Kai’s Red Snow opens with a small, obscured figure running through a blizzard, their red jacket a blurry smear against a field of…
Jeux de plage, the debut feature from Japanese director Aimi Natsuto, is a film that’s more than eager to engage with the greats of…
Set in the Osaka slum of the title, The Kamagasaki Cauldron War’s very existence testifies to its politics: it defies a local ordinance that…
Being Natural is one of those impossible objects, difficult to talk about without spoiling but also not particularly interesting to think about without acknowledging…
Sho Miyake’s And Your Bird Can Sing, based on a novel by the late Yasushi Sato, is sort of like Jules and Jim in…
As the former assistant and protégé of the great Hirokazu Koreeda, Nanako Hirose has made a debut film that unsurprisingly doesn’t stray too far…
Kazuya Shiraishi’s Dare to Stop Us is something of a biopic on late Japanese filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu, who, with films such as The Embryo…
Ma opens with patient dolly shots gliding over a green canopy and through the lush foliage of a forest, eventually coming to rest on…
Twenty years ago, police inspectors Tam (Patrick Tam) and Fong (Jade Leung), along with a squad of elite Hong Kong police special forces, are…
Defying categorization in nearly every conceivable sense, Japanese director Sabu’s Mr. Long may initially suggest itself as an actioner, if one were to look at…