There’s rarely anything out there that feels as deeply as Carol. Todd Haynes’ achingly sublime, artful evocation of love is a rarefied, nearly-extinct breed of cinema that breathes life into the classically refined and restrained form of filmmaking that’s either typically underrated or simply hard to come by these days. For Carol serves as an invitation to ignore […]
The fact that some of the greatest filmmakers of our time have essentially built careers on women going absolutely nuts on screen is worth mentioning since this might just be the turning point for Alex Ross Perry’s professional life. Perhaps it’s early days to declare this, but his latest work, the demented, deliriously savage Queen […]
For those expecting for the new heir to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s Hero in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, look elsewhere. This isn’t the crowd-pleasing, epic-making brand of Chinese martial arts movie made to win awards and please everyone. Sure, Hou was crowned Best Director at Cannes earlier this year, but […]
It’s easy to see When Marnie Was There will touch a lot of emotional chords, and not only because it’s Studio Ghibli’s final effort (in the interim, at least), but also because its themes of memory and loss bear such poignant resonance. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a Ghibli name overshadowed by stalwarts Miyazaki and Takahata, adapts a Joan […]
It’s no secret that the world’s wealthiest, tax-free organisation aka the Vatican preserves the sacrament of priesthood like it’s the Holy Grail, sending so-called disgraced priests into faraway homes in the farthest of isles to face penitence for their mortal sins – most of which involves child abuse. Alex Gibney’s explosive documentary Mea Maxima Culpa […]
There’s no stopping Jia Zhangke. After his gloriously vindictive A Touch of Sin, China’s foremost filmmaker pounces back into the festival scene not with blood splatter but with fountains of tears. Yep. Our tears, precisely, as Zhangke gives those tearducts some serious workout with his take on the traditional weepie, this maximally ministered melodrama Mountains […]
