Ninko (Masato Tsujioka) is just a dedicated monk who desires to live out his days committing himself to the teachings of Buddha. The only problem? Women…
After directing what may have been the worst film screened at last year’s Japan Cuts, director Eiji Uchida bounces back with the much more nuanced character…
Taira (Yuya Yagira) leaves his hometown and his little brother, Shota (Nijiro Murakami), and goes off on a journey to get into fights with just…
The motivating concern of Liu Yulin’s Someone to Talk To is suggested by the film’s title, and repeated endlessly throughout; it’s the idea that lonely…
Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hong’s Godspeed starts like any number of other gangster pictures: a mysterious man is led by other mysterious men into a room…
Zhang Lu’s chatty, relatively plotless A Quiet Dream, for the most part, non-judgmentally observes the interactions between bar-owner Han Ye-ri and her three regulars, film…
While initially scanning like an ultraviolent take on Richard Linklater’s freeform Slacker (early scenes find the camera roaming Vietnamese streets in search of heinous acts),…
Deeply atmospheric and tonally akin to a variety of nefarious pseudo-procedural Asian imports of the past two decades (The Cure, Memories of Murder, The Wailing),…
Derek Tsang’s Soul Mate seems an odd choice for a Summer 2017 festival; it was already released in both China and the U.S. as recently as…
Buried within Kei Ishikawa’s artfully moody debut feature, Traces of Sin, are two intriguing narrative strands. The first involves the long-lasting effects and indelible scars of physical and…
Like a Hong Kong version of Lodge Kerrigan’s indie, sorta-classic Clean, Shaven, Wong Chun’s debut, Mad World, plunks recently rehab-ed, bipolar disorder sufferer Tung (Shawn Yue)…
You wouldn’t know what to call Mrs. B. if the title of Jero Yun’s film didn’t tell you. The lengths gone to keep the specifics…
Using the cinematic approach of a Grimes video, Japanese Girls Never Die presents a glossy and hyperactive aesthetic, but little in the way of substance. Following…
It doesn’t even seem possible that Jack Kao’s played aging gangster roles for more than 20 years, but here we are. The frequent Hou Hsiao-hsien…
“I don’t give a shit about politics or elections” screams Yeon-hong (Son Ye-jin) at her husband, Jong-chan (Kim Joo-hyuk), near the halfway point of The Truth…
“Life is others” writes the central character of The Long Excuse, Sachio (Masahiro Motoki), near the end of the film. And How Sachio goes from being…
In Blood of Youth, a convoluted tale of revenge by Chinese director Yang Shupeng, a young man (Yan Haoqi) suffers a traumatic injury defending a…
Reconfiguring a classic pinku film as a somewhat more tasteful modern-day indie melodrama seems like a terrible idea, and guess what, it is. Kazuya Shiraichi’s…
A fanciful period piece set just after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Chen Yu-Hsun’s The Village of No Return may have an ominous sounding English…
“I hope we’ll have fun and party, that’s why I’m here!” This is what Lilly (Laure Calamy) tells an excited crowd of French retreaters in The…
Ala Eddine Slim’s The Last of Us is the type of film that’s inevitably described as “spare,” “rigorous,” and “conceptually bold.” Unfolding over a distended 94…