Gimmicks and tricks have been around since the birth of cinema, whether it be Cinemascope, 3-D, or Smell-o-Vision (thank you, John Waters). The ones that stood the test of time generally enhance the overall cinematic experience. Others, such as the Dogme 95 movement and, please God, found footage films, fade into the collective memory of […]

The New York Film Festival’s impressive lineup this year includes a number of celebrated directors from Asia. Perhaps the most anticipated of these, prior to its Cannes premiere, was Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, his exquisite take on the martial arts film, which netted Hou a best director prize at Cannes. Hou will make a rare […]

As the son of Turkish immigrants to Germany, writer/director Fatih Akin specifically cites Istanbul-born Elia Kazan’s America America (1963), with its bitter scenes of the Turks’ oppressive treatment of minorities during the end of Ottoman control, as inspiring him to more fully portray the devastation of the Armenian people during World War I. The Cut […]

If you take the word sweet, whisk away the S and move a few letters around, you end up with twee. Asia Argento’s Misunderstood veers between the two states while chronicling the travails of a preteen girl and her eccentric family in 1980s Rome. Along the way the film flirts with peril and incendiary themes, […]

One of the most pessimistic, yet accurate, onscreen portrayals of modern life in quite some time, writer/director Yury Bykov’s The Fool is the best kind of morality tale, because it all but denies the very existence of morality. In the Russian town where the film transpires, it has become exceedingly rare to have a shred […]

For director Morgan Matthews’s first feature film, he drew upon a documentary he produced and directed about the selection and training of the British team for the 2006 International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), titled Brilliant Young Minds (2007). Many of the young competitors had a form of autism, which that film linked to their mathematical ability. […]

Goodnight Mommy has one crackin’ good premise, but it doesn’t quite know what to do with it. This Austrian film aims for the sparseness and sleekness of recent arty Scandinavian horror, and in doing so, falls into self-enforced blandness. It treads the straight path instead of really examining its characters and ends up letting down […]

She’s your best friend. Your cruelest enemy. Sexier than you. Cooler. No one makes you feel as alive as she does. And no one knows better how to make you feel so small. She stole your boyfriend. Turned your girlfriends against you. But you’ll do anything to be around her. You love her. You hate […]

The premieres of films by internationally known directors attracted most of the coverage at Cannes: consider the critical love that was bestowed upon Todd Haynes’s Carol or the thumping Gus van Sant received for The Sea of Trees. Big names were represented from all over: Asian auteurs (Jia Zhang-ke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and the big […]