The title of Erica Xia-Hou’s stirring if conspicuous first feature is not a misprint: “banr,” translated and truncated from the Mandarin term for “partner,”…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon…
The title appears like a misnomer. At a tight 67 minutes, and with such glorious irreverence embedded within its form, Broken Rage doesn’t even…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited…
Genre fare has sunk to new depths with The Dead Thing, Elric Kane’s first solo-directed feature — and an enervating one at that. There’s…
“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç)…
Matching the restless anomie of its cityscapes, or perhaps in contrast to their flurry of homogenous activity, Li Dongmei’s Guo Ran foregrounds an inscrutable…
If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a…
Activism often dictates that form follows function, and that the message must come through at all costs — even if it should sacrifice the…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite…
Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost…
It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that Daaaaaalí!, Quentin Dupieux’s 77-minute portrait of the surrealist artist, is a biography of some kind. Nor…
Frat lives fall flat. That, at least to the outsider, is a reasonable conclusion to draw from the many unwelcome instances of its bearers…
“Our dominance is supreme and our isolation is profound.” These words, taken from N. Scott Momaday’s essay, “A Storyteller and His Art,” pronounce the…
Not much is said about the blemishes of an auteur’s career, especially if they prove to be wholly uncharacteristic of its maker’s blueprint. Idiosyncratic…
Cinema’s obsessions with images are the result of its propensity for their proliferation: although literature tempts the wayward imagination, cinema is what drives it…
“Someone’s inside.” These two words, uttered with ominous clarity, spur Jason Yu’s invigorating debut, Sleep, into malevolent and mysterious somnolence; for in the world…
Pascal Plante’s third feature, Red Rooms, premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, before screening to both critical and popular acclaim at Fantasia, where…