In this dispatch: Kinki, Cold War…
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…
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…
In this dispatch: Turgaud…
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…
In this dispatch: Sheep in the…
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,…
A life sentence would seem to afford you a good deal of thinking time. But for Akutsu, a former yakuza facing his last days on…
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…
In this dispatch: Faith Lacking Deeds…
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…