Charting the emotional whiplash experienced by a young girl as she develops a crush on a classmate who subsequently gets together with her high school…
In attempting to navigate some difficult familial terrain in a similar vein as her contemporary, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yukiko Mishima ultimately fails to escape rote contrivance…
Sunny Chan’s debut film, Men on the Dragon, is about four middle-aged men who work at a Hong Kong telecommunications company and signed up for a dragon…
Chinese cinematographer-turned-director Dong Yue’s very, very rainy neo-noir The Looming Storm seems, for a while, like it may be doing something pretty impressive. While the film…
The visual style of young Taiwanese director Huang Xi’s debut film, Missing Johnny, bears resemblance to the once-prominent New Wave movement established by his countrymen…
Jeong Ga-young’s Hit the Night has drawn comparisons to the films of Hong Sang-soo, likely because it features a lot of drinking, even more talking,…
Using the classic yakuza crime-thriller Battles Without Honor and Humanity as a key text of inspiration, The Blood of Wolves tries to peddle tired cliches…
A transfer student targeted by classmates in her small, rural town exacts hyperbolically gory vengeance in Liverleaf, Eisuke Naito’s adaptation of a cult-horror manga by…
Jeon Go-woon’s debut feature Microhabitat offers a conceptually ambitious and thematically rich premise: a young woman named Miso (Esom) — who leads a simple, balanced…
One room, six cameras, thirty-something individuals — these are the spare elements with which Leigh Ledare constructs The Task, a scintillating study of group dynamics…
Morgellons is a mysterious illness whose sufferers claim causes horrible breakouts, hair loss, and most curiously, the growth of strange, multi-colored fibers that protrude from…
Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory is a Marxist, near three-hour Portuguese drama about labor in a capitalist society. That description might make the film (which took home…
If directors João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis have accomplished anything through their expansion of the world of their previous documentary’s subject — the Cape Verde-born, Portuguese-based Miguel Moreira…
Our House is a haunted house movie in which no one — neither characters nor audience — can differentiate between those who are alive and those who…
Ilian Metev’s 3/4 opens with a plastic bottle skidding across the sunlit pavement of a schoolyard. A group of young boys bob in and out of the…
The most noticeable element of Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi’s Ava is its use of red. Although the film’s color palette is generally dominated by blacks, grays,…
Dragonfly Eyes, the first feature film from Beijing installation artist Xu Bing, is at least sociologically interesting: It’s comprised largely of repurposed CCTV surveillance camera footage that’s…
Slovakia-born Canadian director Ingrid Veninger’s Porcupine Lake is a sensitive, sun-dappled summer idyll (with dark undercurrents) on themes of coming of age, preteen-love-fumblings, and the inevitable realization…
Violeta Ayala’s fascinating documentary Cocaine Prison doesn’t have anything particularly new to say about the failed social and criminal policies of a thoroughly unwinnable war against…
The no-budget, dually high-concept premises of Jenna Bass’s High Fantasy: four South African twentysomethings (two women of color, a white woman, and a black man)…
In Zaida Bergroth’s Miami, the meek Anna (Sonja Kuittinen) is reunited with her estranged sister, Angela (Krista Kosonen)—a club dancer in dutch with the mob—and…