Tony Jaa, action cinema’s favorite Muay Thai fighter, has faded from the limelight a bit after a quiet decade so far. He entered into it…
The crime genre bleeds blue. Crimes tend to be bad, and that makes it easy to establish the police, by the nature of their work,…
In a movie titled A Normal Family, one thing can be certain: the family is obligated to abnormality. Hur Jin-ho’s newest film, an adaptation of…
The most experimental regional cinema in the world might belong to the Arab Levant. As a region destabilized by a non-Indigenous oppressive neighbor for virtually…
Last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Estonian art film 8 Views of Lake Biwa translated a Japanese storytelling tradition of “eight views”…
An improbable 14 films in, and the Star Trek franchise has finally delivered its first truly unwatchable feature film. It’s difficult to think of a…
Some movies are so bad that you stop watching them. Life is too short to endure consumerist rubbish that affronts art. Other movies are so…
There is no perfect formula for a first scene — art is simply too complex to make such generalizations. The pulsing action of Jackie Chan’s…
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 mask…
Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter to…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that the…
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 most…
Money speaks everywhere in the world and in all creative industries, so Dancing Village: The Curse Begins comes as no surprise following KKN di Desa…
“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 roll…
Passion projects like Kubi almost always deserve greater appreciation and more careful interest than a mere evaluation of their qualitative values can merit. Takeshi Kitano…
Kalki 2898 AD, the most expensive Indian movie to ever hit the box office, is a pure delight for the eyes and full of surprises.…
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 film’s…
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…
“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 and…
“The thing in the corner is a vagina tightener. Women always ask for these,” says the usually quiet young university student Saruul (Bayarjargal Bayartsetseg) while…