Beautiful Things deals with some explicitly not beautiful things: oil drilling, cargo hauling, self-described “torture” (scientific experimentation), and trash burning. All these odd occupations are tied together by…
Critics out of Cannes labeled Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Unknown Girl “a lesser work.” If that’s the case, it just proves that the brothers are…
Sunao Katabuchi’s In This Corner of the World—adapted from the 2007 manga of the same name—provides the perspective of a WWII Japanese housewife enduring the…
Bertrand Bonello’s controversial new feature Nocturama, which was passed over by both the Cannes and Venice film festivals, has been pigeonholed as a film that supports…
Most documentaries live and die by how much they can ‘get out of’ their subjects, which makes Escapes seem relatively low-stakes at first. In chronicling the life…
“The selling point is that they’re not yet developed” says otaku Shin after seeing a concert of middle school-aged girls singing their hearts out to a crowd…
Street thug Fan (Neo Yau) lives fast as a hooligan with little regard for authority or his own life, regularly dealing with crooks and lawbreakers.…
Ninko (Masato Tsujioka) is just a dedicated monk who desires to live out his days committing himself to the teachings of Buddha. The only problem? Women…
After directing what may have been the worst film screened at last year’s Japan Cuts, director Eiji Uchida bounces back with the much more nuanced character…
Using the cinematic approach of a Grimes video, Japanese Girls Never Die presents a glossy and hyperactive aesthetic, but little in the way of substance. Following…
“I don’t give a shit about politics or elections” screams Yeon-hong (Son Ye-jin) at her husband, Jong-chan (Kim Joo-hyuk), near the halfway point of The Truth…
“Everything disgusts me,” exclaims dying King Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The most disgusting thing present? The repulsive nature of aristocracy, laid out in full view…
“I hope we’ll have fun and party, that’s why I’m here!” This is what Lilly (Laure Calamy) tells an excited crowd of French retreaters in The…
If there’s one noticeable (and troubling) trend in this year’s ND/NF , it’s a pointless rigor exerted in an effort to appear more “serious.” Case in point, Zhang…
Park Kwang-hyun’s Fabricated City seems at first to play its premise straight: Kwon Yoo (Ji Chan-wool) uses a popular MMO game to escape from the growing…
Big Sean wants you to realize how important I Decided. is: From the ominous intro of pouring rain to the voicemail interludes throughout, this project…
Through a career that’s spanned 16 mixtapes (four of them released commercially), three label deals (Cash Money Records, 1017 Records, and 300 Entertainment), and yet still no…
What Kenneth Lonergan understands, probably better than any other writer-director working today, is how difficult it is to communicate grief in a convincing way on…
Park Chan-wook’s career has largely been steeped in a particular fusion of twisty revenge narratives padded with philosophical implications. His latest, The Handmaiden, feels particularly…
Jim Jarmusch’s career trajectory has afforded distinct perspectives on his work, especially as that relates to the idea of a monotonous kind of living. Paterson is…