The Philippines, an archipelago of over 7,000 islands, comprises diverse ethnic groups with an equally diverse array of beliefs, languages, and customs. Comparisons to the…
“Democracy dies in darkness,” the slogan of The Washington Post, couldn’t be further removed from the salvational rhetoric witnessed in Brazil with the rise of…
A fabulistic streak tints the proceedings of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard, David Verbeek’s ninth feature, with a sheen of greyscale anonymity that…
“Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” muses Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) to her daughter, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), in a display of gentle and…
Much has been made about the terror of the deep blue sea and its inhabitants, and the shark movie in particular is a genre unto…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
In the face of ongoing, ever-intensifying genocide, nuance is arguably out of order, and so agit-prop wisdom becomes a creative’s necessary juice. But for Israeli…
Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…
Having cemented his status with 2017’s Sweet Country — a beguiling if sometimes schematic topography of race and coloniality in the outback — as a…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
There’s a deadpan finality in the titular utterance of Iair Said’s first fiction feature, a contrived despondency passing off as statistical fact. In Most People…
Stray dogs, lone horses, and rampant horniness may not make for pleasing documentary subject matter, but they add to the sense of joie de vivre…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A story…
Watching the opening credits of Mimi Cave’s Holland, one would not be entirely remiss to recall the barren sound stage of Lars von Trier’s Dogville.…
Empires, as a rule, do not exist in the plural, for each empire conceives of itself as sovereign and total. In practice, this solipsism has…
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,” serves…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon death,…
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 need…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a…
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 a…