Chinese-Canadian writer-director Xiaodan He’s film Montreal, My Beautiful is a thoughtful, understated independent film with an ace up its sleeve: the film’s protagonist is played…
Though Western cinephiles are likely most familiar with Herman Yau through the grisly Category III shockers he made with Anthony Wong (Taxi Hunter, The Untold…
At the small airport in Karatas, Bek (Berik Aitzhanov) arrives dressed for another climate. Greasy hair hangs around his untrimmed beard, and a heavy fur…
One of the better moments in Park Joon-ho’s debut feature, 3670, is its first. The young, timid Cheol-jun (Cho Yoo-hyun) climaxes during a sexual encounter…
There’s an old axiom about how you can’t manufacture a cult favorite, and instead the audience has to find it and organically turn it into…
Fujiko (Yuki Katayama) sells insurance to a cook by making her life part of the policy. She looks at her prospective client, adopts a hangdog…
Let’s get this out of the way: Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s Sai: Disaster is not a complete work, or at least not one that…
80 is the new 60! With healthcare improving and human longevity increasing, it’s a golden age for the Medicare-eligible filmmaker — in the last decade,…
Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn walks a very fine line, attempting to infuse a miserabilist, post-neo-realist tale of urban destitution with a candy-colored pop aesthetic while putting us…
Pain is not a present sensation. Pain is a memory. Like all sensations, by the time information — be it visual, aural, or anything else…
Death is awful, but the language we use to describe death is arguably worse. Humorist Norm Macdonald, who himself died of cancer, took issue with…
If you were to flip past Marine Atlan’s film La Gradiva on TV (which used to be a thing you could do), you might think…
It was in December 1923, only months after military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera had seized power amidst the ongoing systemic crisis of Spain’s Restoration…
A more oblique interlocutor than Matthew McConaughey’s nihilist operative “Rust” Cohle in True Detective, Sawandi Groskind’s Staubwelt arguably dramatizes the central premise of philosophical pessimism…
The question of how to depict violence has plagued, or in other cases not bothered, filmmakers since the medium’s inception. In Felipe Rúgeles Pineda’s new…
In dreams, everyone is equal. Regardless of age, status, or character, we all sleep. In sleep, we all dream. And there, what happens is, for…
There is a playful disconnect between the title of Mokya Shin’s EASTER and its subject matter. Although South Korea’s most prominent religion (after atheism or…
Like his 2010 film Cologne Overnight, Declan Clarke’s latest, Love and the End of Romance in Czechoslovakia, takes an instructive approach. Title cards loaded with…
The portable camera is more accessible now than perhaps ever before, and as a result, the diary film seems to have found its footing within…
If who you are is a sin, what are the consequences of simply living your life? Traditional spiritualism clashes with modern individualism in Nader Saeivar’s…
Seemingly participating in a new trend of grandiloquent, marquee-busting film titles that includes the Mosotho drama Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film…