Drive My Car is the latest proof that Ryusuke Hamaguchi is thinking much bigger than most of his contemporaries. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has fast become one of the more dependable filmmakers regularly working the international festival circuit, ever since he broke big at Locarno in 2015…
I Was a Simple Man is a wildly contradictory affair, rife with unresolved ideas and a deluge a thematic material that find little purchase. “Maybe we don’t deserve to go so easily” — this line is offered in response to the gruesome account of a…
After Asako I & II, Hamaguchi’s latest can’t help but feel like something of a step backward into less aesthetically daring filmmaking. “Once Again”, the third and final chapter of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, begins with a crawl of…
Zhang Yimou’s One Second was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, but was pulled at the last, ahem, second for what were claimed to be “technical reasons” widely assumed to be political censorship, due to the film’s Cultural Revolution setting.…
Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on a…
Nearly a decade after his previous feature, the 2012 big-budget disaster movie tentpole The Tower — South Korea’s very belated answer to The Towering Inferno — director Kim Ji-hoon returns to the apartment-building-in-extreme-peril genre with Sinkhole, a goofy and super-dumb yet undeniably entertaining commercial…
Time, Ricky Ko’s debut feature after a decade of assistant directing, opens with its splashiest and most exciting sequence. Featuring a male and female assassin, along with their getaway driver, executing a hit, the scene utilizes comic-book freeze-frames in a sly homage to ’60s…
Last August, fresh from the premiere of time-bending action thriller Tenet, Tom Cruise giddily proclaimed: “Big movie. Big screen. Loved it.” Nolan’s movie may have indeed been “big’” but it was a far cry from the industry-saving event so much anticipatory coverage had promised.…
Sam Levinson, Jaden Smith, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maya Hawke, and Bryce Dallas Howard: the rise of nepotism babies is far from over. Gross, sleezy, and borderline unethical, nepotism has plagued both Hollywood and independent film spheres since their inception. The casual platforming of certain celebrity…
Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing burrows her contemplative sensibility into the archiving of a contemporary reality. On the fiction end of the work, if it can be called fictitious, we glean ephemeral insights into…