Cannes is one of, if not the most-esteemed film festivals in the modern circuit, hosting the premieres of the hottest, most-abstract, "I-don't-get-it-but-everyone-else-loves-it" films and filmmakers in the medium. For its 72nd incarnation, ...
The Criterion Channel officially launched today, which is a dream for lovers of cinema. The streaming service was born following the untimely demise of FilmStruck last year. The Criterion Channel offers subscribers access to practically all...
Though the trailer is solely in Bong's native Korean, we'd be remiss not to share the first real look at the Korean auteur's next feature, Parasite, which today also gets a funky-lookin' poster.
What is your life going to look like in the future? Who will you be close to, what will you do? I have a tough time picturing what I’m doing for dinner this week, let alone answering those questions. With Ash is Purest White, Chinese ...
Writer/director Hu Bo took his own life shortly after completing An Elephant Sitting, adapted from one of his own stories. He was only 29 years old. His lone feature film is so deeply moving and despondent. It is beautiful, and yet it aches...
Watching The House reminded me of college, of the days when filmmakers were producing slick but low budget horror shorts for YouTube in the hopes that these efforts would open the door to recognition and funding to make feature films. Every...
You’ve probably seen Veronica Ngo (Ngô Thanh Vân) on the big screen before but didn’t realize it. Her biggest role was in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. She played Rose’s sister, who dies in the bombing run that ope...
An introductory scene of Gaspar Noé’s Climax gives viewers some hints of what to expect. Interviews with the film’s character play on a CRT TV, where they speak of the artistic power of dance and what it means to their li...
The Cannibal Club has a strong opening that blends convention and originality with something of a sinister smirk. Otavio (Tavinho Teixeira) and Gilda (Ana Luiza Rios) are a wealthy married couple in Brazil. Otavio owns a security firm and l...
Producing a follow up to 2015's stark Amazonian adventure Embrace of the Serpent must be an unenviable task. Where that film--the first Columbian production to be nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film--seeps in...
Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is once again garnering buzz around the festival circuit with his latest feature Ash is Purest White, which gets a new trailer courtesy of distributor Cohen Media Group.
In the post-apocalyptic wilderness, a lone woman roams. She's armed to the teeth and keeps a trusty hawk as a lookout. She's an escapee from an experimental lab where she was injected with a mysterious super-juice in an attempt to turn her ...
From its eye-catching classic poster, to its high-noon soundtrack and a sweeping vista, Let the Corpses Tan gives the impression of a modern twist to the spaghetti western. Though this French interpretation of an Italian interpretation of a...
Family get togethers suck. There's no doubt about it. It's only that much worse when we have to introduce our girlfriend to our racist, news-obsessed, paranoid dad. We've all been there. Add to that some sort of epidemic, an extreme lockdo...
Five self-appointed protectors watch over the railroad town of Marseilles. They ride through rolling parries, the rock faces of mountains filling the background. The iconography of the American western is alive and well through the South Af...
A mythic force is spiriting people away in a rundown Mexican town, leaving droves of abandoned children to cluster together and wander the streets themselves. This force is responsible for the disappearance of 10-year-old Estrella's (Paola ...
Tokyo Vampire Hotel has a scene in which a legless Geisha vampire who feeds people to the hotel through her vagina laughs maniacally as a fountain of blood streams from an open wound into her mouth and heavy metal music pulses and pounds in...
Let's get this out of the way right now: If you're a little girl alone in a creepy hotel at night, whatever you do, don't enter room 666. Age shouldn't even matter. Just don't do it. Parents need to teach their children some common sense. I...
Neighbors suck. They're loud. They complain. They get in your business. They fight, bicker, air their laundry (not the sexy stuff) in front of you, and offer nothing of value to anyone's lives ever. The best kinds of neighbors are the ones ...
Gross movies are a blast for me. I know not a lot of people agree, but there's something about splurts of goo and guts whizzing past the screen that fills me with a childlike glee. Needless to say, I'm intrigued by the upcoming The Night o...
Number 37 is the first feature from South African director Nosipho Dumisa, which uses Hitchcock's Rear Window as a skeleton around which it wraps a thriller of drug dealers and debts. Randal (Irshaad Ally) has been left paralyzed ...
Imagine if you will a rotating wheel formed of wood and axes with a steam-breathing cow skull filling its center. In stuttering animation, this contraption rolls across a hill to a shed where a cow is chained. The contraption uses its ax-le...
The Square, the latest film from Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund, reveals its entire thesis in its opening scenes. Anne, an art journalist (Elizabeth Moss), interviews Christian, an art museum curator (Claes Bang). She quotes a bi...
The second annual Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ended last night. I wasn't able to check out nearly as many films as I'd hoped to. For instance, I unfortunately missed the opening night film, Housewife by director Can Evrenol. By all accoun...
Zama is a novelistic film, but not because it's an adaptation of a 1956 Argentinian novel by Antonio di Benedetto. Watching Zama creates a feeling that's similar to reading. The shots are so carefully composed, the sound design so meti...
Each critic has their own process. Some take notes while watching a film and others will rush home to type up their thoughts immediately after a showing. Others still don't write anything for a while, preferring to mull it all over in their...
I'm not a fan of the term "post-horror", which was coined by Guardian writer Steve Rose. The prefix is too loaded, suggesting that horror is a second-rate genre that's been transcended. I prefer to keep genre labels loose than creating some...
While I had some issues with Can Evernol's Baskin, I was still impressed by its style and its gruesome, unrelenting horror. It reminded me of an Italian horror movie by way of Clive Barker. Evernol's latest film, Housewife, looks like it bu...
The seventh Old School Kung Fu Fest kicks off today in New York City at The Metrograph. The event runs all weekend, and celebrates the kick ass women of classic martial arts cinema. The official theme is "Wonder Women of the Martial Arts", ...
Subway Cinema's seventh edition of The Old School Kung Fu Fest is back this weeked at The Metrograph, running from Friday, August 18th through Sunday, August 20th. Last year's Old School Kung Fu Fest celebrated Golden Harvest, the quintesse...
In what may be the final years of Alejandro Jodorowsky's life, his work has turned inward and become sentimentally personal. He's exploring his own autobiography, but retelling it in his own odd way. Jodorowsky's previous film, 2013's The D...
It's that time of year again. One of the best film festivals in the city is about to get underway. The New York Asian Film Festival kicks off tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The annual showcase of Asian cinema runs from June ...
I'm not familiar with the films of Sunao Katabuchi, but after watching the trailer for In This Corner of the World, I want to seek out his previous anime features: Princess Arete and Mai Mai Miracle. Katabuchi was also an assistant dir...
Bong Joon-Ho's Okja looks like a hoot--a Spielbergian eco-adventure about a brave girl and her mutant super pig. Reviews out of Cannes have been generally positive, and Bong himself seems pleased with Netflix allowing him to have final cut ...
There's something undeniably charming about Sam Voutas' King of Peking. I smiled my way through a lot of the film, and snippets of its feel-good score (AM radio easy listening, in a good way) have been stuck in my head this week as I'v...
Juzo Itami's Tampopo was a quirky blend of western tropes and epicurean delight. SABU's Mr. Long is sort of like a nihilistic Tampopo. We follow a skilled assassin from Taiwan named Long (a brooding Chen Chang) who gets waylaid after a botc...
I want to describe the opening scene of Rainer Sarnet's November because it's absolutely bonkers. There's a sentient creature comprised of three scythes and a cow skull. It moves in a herky-jerky fashion using its scythes as feet and l...
I feel like I might have appreciated Rock'n Roll more if I was familiar with French pop culture and the country's film industry. Writer, director, and star Guillaume Canet packs his comedy with real-life French celebrities playing surreal c...
Even though Hayao Miyazaki is no longer retired, Studio Ghibli is in a transition period. The venerable studio went on a hiatus in 2014. The following year, producer Yoshiaki Nishimura and other Ghibli members started their own company, Stu...
Makoto Shinkai's Your Name is the highest-grossing anime film of all-time, and it hasn't even come out in the United States yet. It beat Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away; give it a few more months and Your Name may beat Spirited Away as the h...
