There is no perfect formula for a first scene — art is simply too complex to make such generalizations. The pulsing action of Jackie…
Our multiplexes and home theaters desperately miss the erotic thriller. Every few years, one or two squeaky clean PG-13 studio productions will don the…
Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that…
A tasteless trend in movie marketing to reveal titles one letter at a time transitioned seamlessly into movie-making at some point in the last…
Hero is one of the great films by one of the world’s most brilliant image-makers in Zhang Yimou, shot by one of the world’s…
Money speaks everywhere in the world and in all creative industries, so Dancing Village: The Curse Begins comes as no surprise following KKN di…
“In the end, they swallowed up the nation as a whole.” The last lines of the epilogue intertitle of Kim Sung-soo’s 12:12: The Day…
Passion projects like Kubi almost always deserve greater appreciation and more careful interest than a mere evaluation of their qualitative values can merit. Takeshi…
Kalki 2898 AD, the most expensive Indian movie to ever hit the box office, is a pure delight for the eyes and full of…
If you watch Trigger Warning, Netflix’s latest big-budget action movie, with captions turned on, you may notice the phrase “terrorist, in Arabic” in the…
Bikechess is a strange name for Assel Aushakimova’s latest work. The scene that gives the Kazakh film its name comes in the beginning, with…
“The island is safe, except for those who aren’t invited.” This quote from one of the natives on the Italian island where a rich…
“The thing in the corner is a vagina tightener. Women always ask for these,” says the usually quiet young university student Saruul (Bayarjargal Bayartsetseg)…
The newest and biggest film of Maïwenn’s directorial career, Jeanne du Barry, a film whose subject is the eponymously named final mistress to Louis…
Four films into any series, you either change or die, and the copaganda finally outruns the action choreography in the fourth installment in The…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with…
A pregnant woman nearing delivery self-pleasures by rubbing her privates against a bedpost. An attempted murder, in a flavor reminiscent of the book of…