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…
Chinese documentarian Wang Bing is interested in process, in the minutiae of daily life within a system—and especially in the way systems break down. So…
Beautiful Things deals with some explicitly not beautiful things: oil drilling, cargo hauling, self-described “torture” (scientific experimentation), and trash burning. All these odd occupations are tied together by…
Adapted from its director’s own novel, Junko Emoto’s The Extremists’ Opera is often at its best when its roving handheld camera has the good sense…
Shingo Matsumura’s Love and Goodbye and Hawaii is a rare gem, an off-beat light comedy about young people that is neither cute nor contrived, founded…
Takuro Nakamura’s West North West—the direction to Mecca from Tokyo—details a sort-of-kind-of love triangle between three women: Iranian exchange student Naima (Sahel Rosa), bartender Kei (Hanae Kan),…
“The selling point is that they’re not yet developed” says otaku Shin after seeing a concert of middle school-aged girls singing their hearts out to a crowd…
Marking French writer-director Jean-Gabriel Periot’s first step into fiction filmmaking (after a string of documentaries), Summer Lights opens, fittingly, with a simple, sustained talking-head interview.…
Okinawan filmmaker Gō Takamine’s Hengyoro is an unclassifiable collage. More or less centered on the story of a couple of elderly men who perform what they…
In The Great Passage—a film for which Yûya Ishii won Best Director from both the Japanese Academy Awards and Kinema Junpo—the decades-long story of dictionary writers…
Beneath the lightly comedic surface of Yuki Tanada’s My Dad and Mr. Ito lies a more serious and sharply observed riff on Tokyo Story that…
Although widely dismissed during its initial premiere, Daguerrotype, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first French-language production, finds the Japanese genre master in peak form; the first hour alone…
A deep, perceptive empathy towards some of the most marginalized, vulnerable, and exploited members of society—here, transgender people and teen runaways—is the most remarkable and…
Nikkatsu is in the process of rolling out a new crop of “romantic pornography” (or Roman Porno) films—a throwback to their heyday in the 1970s…
An action-comedy in the jiangshi (hopping vampire) tradition, Vampire Cleanup Department concerns Tim (Babyjohn Choi), a nerdy loner who is bitten on the ass by…