Some types of horror are cosmic; others cautionary. In our day and age, when productions often come with a press kit full of themes,…
In a small village in Jharkhand, east India prowls a tiger; this tiger is misogyny, and its fellow tigers constitute the broader institutions of…
Writing in 1924, the rhetorician and literary critic I.A. Richards remarked, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, on the “futility of all argumentation that…
Film is a collection of stills, yet rarely is film still; in the empire of the moving image, action and reaction reign supreme. But…
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s…
Though they lived a millennium and a half apart, Aristotle and Dante Alighieri shared a conception of love that gave rise to most of…
For a work whose subject matter purports to straddle the lofty and permanent, its subject appears remarkably contingent. The Eternal Memory, Maite Alberdi’s latest…
The age of streaming is the age of accelerated attention — attention caught, swept away, and crystallized in breathless signification. Breathless, because what underlines…
No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real…
Clocking in at a breezy 73 minutes, Kokomo City — which bagged audience awards at both the Sundance and Berlin film festivals — proves…
Of the three leads in They Cloned Tyrone, Juel Taylor’s wild conspiracy caper, not one is actually named Tyrone. It’s a slight detail that…
For the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the world comprised a single substance, and that substance was God. “Except God,” he wrote in the treatise…
The burgeoning demand for cinematic “relevance” today comes with several implicit assumptions as to what that relevance entails. For starters, there’s a certain complementary…
A deceptive airiness courses through No Love Lost, the sophomore feature from Erwan Le Duc — which follows his equally quaint and whimsical The…
Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who imbued such courtly antics…
One of the biggest pitfalls of depicting and representing trauma arrives precisely and most insidiously in what appears to be its greatest strength: by…
The premise is hit-or-miss: imagine a circus troupe in the vein of the Fantastic Four, but situated smack in the middle of Nazi-infested Rome,…
In what can be construed both as commendation and criticism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. is assuredly a film of the times. Its contemporary grappling with…