True crime documentaries in the streaming era are a dime a dozen, catnip for those who consume their content passively. They can be reasonably diverting…
Back Home Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts…
It’s nothing less than a miracle that restorations of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ criminally underseen Tras-os-Montes, Ana, and Rosa de Areia are making their…
Leni Riefenstahl’s contribution to the evolution of film form cannot be overstated. It follows us like an apparition: look no further than Spielberg’s The Fabelmans…
Bing Liu ascribed a refreshingly unsentimental energy to the coming-of-age genre in his Oscar-nominated documentary, Minding the Gap. For his debut narrative feature, Preparation for…
Opening on a failed suicide attempt, you’d never expect to dovetail into a charming and winding meet-cute over the course of a Christmas Eve. Yet…
The August dog days of cinema’s summer season are typically filled with second-rate tentpoles and mid-sized studio fare designed to capitalize on undiscerning audiences looking…
A House of Dynamite For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how…
Jay Kelly A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that…
Recently, an organization called Third Way, comprised of conservative Democrats and their corporate donors, sent out a list of “forbidden terms” that people on the…
A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…
Jay Roach’s cause is noble. His new movie, The Roses, joins just a handful of contemporaries swinging to break a decades-long theatrical dry spell for…
“You tell me things I never found in Plato or Hegel.” Romantic expressions like this abound in Isiah Medina’s latest, Gangsterism, a film noir set…
“I HATE YOU ALL.” So begins Gangsterism, Isiah Medina’s latest film. Lest one doubt his sincerity, the poster is tagged with a statement of intent:…
“There is no dead matter,” the narrator’s father proselytizes in Bruno Schulz’s 1937 book Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, “lifelessness is only a…
Creative partners since the early 1940s, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly hadn’t actually made a film together for three years when It’s Always Fair Weather…
Since 1974, Troma Entertainment has enjoyed its position as the longest running independent film studio in the world, having been responsible for either the production…
Writing in the second issue of the Southeast Asian film magazine MARG1N, Singaporean wunderkind Yeo Siew Hua lamented the incongruence between filmic and lived reality,…
Whether they be achieved formally, thematically, or even sonically, few filmmakers are capable of pulling off a myriad of genres like that of impossibly dexterous…
What really is the Circle of Life for people (and animals) not comfortably positioned inside the perfectly calibrated version of Disneyland? Do the laws and…
The central tension of Caught Stealing — an ostensibly breezy “wrong man” comedic-thriller set in Giuliani-era New York City that finds our besieged main character, Hank…