Soul Emir Ezwan’s debut feature, Soul, is part of an emerging Malaysian cinema heavily composed of genre fare. Made for roughly $80,000 USD, the…
Night of the Kings Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to…
Lahi, Hayop Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian…
Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip…
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good…
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to…
Beasts Clawing at Straws The new Korean crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is a derivative, charmless bit of Tarantino-aping nonsense, a convoluted mess…
Undergods Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the…
The Dark & the Wicked It’s unfortunate that Bryan Bertino’s debut feature was 2008’s The Strangers. The film is the 21st century’s best instance…
The Reckoning On its face, The Reckoning seems like a strange follow-up for director Neil Marshall, after last year’s mid-budget Hellboy reset. Then again,…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service…
Alone John Hyams’ new film Alone is a minor miracle. A terrifically tense thriller pared down to the barest essentials, it is survival horror…
Patrick The elevator pitch for Patrick immediately calls to mind Lukas Valenta Rinner’s A Decent Woman — both films are outré comedies set in…
Chasing Dream Johnnie To’s Chasing Dream is a return in more ways than one. An earnest romance between an MMA fighter, Tiger (Jacky Heung),…
Tame Impala Kevin Parker is often praised for his ability to take a sound that audiences are familiar with and contort it into something…
Lil Wayne “It has been quite a journey / From my driveway to my front door / It has been quite a journey.” Lil…
Grimes Not since Bjork’s 1997 watershed Homogenic has a weird pop artist cast a masterpiece in the mold of Miss Anthropocene: a fusion of progressive sonics,…