Chilling and nightmarish, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is on acts of remembering the 1965-1966 government-sanctioned mass killings of Communists in Indonesia. ‘Acts of remembering’ is the operative term because the documentary has as its principal subject one of the fo... Read More »
Rodrigo Reyes presents a Buñuel-inspired mosaic of the flora and fauna of la frontera (‘the border’) that separates Mexico from the United States and the towns found on either side of it. Through interviews and disparate shots of places/objects, it captures impressions of the kin... Read More »
Those who know Grace Lee’s work will recall her 2003 documentary The Grace Lee Project. In the film, Lee looks at the women who share this common name in the United States, and in the process addresses the concepts of ‘Asian American’ and ‘Asian American woman.’ One of the Grace ... Read More »
As much as it hurts to say it, Hong Sang-soo's latest film finds his stories of cloying relationships and sadomasochistic men-women foibles wearing thin. After the initial glow of re-encountering Hong's formal language of two-person medium shots, zooms, and left-right pans, and g... Read More »
In the context of firsts even before one can contemplate the narrative, Wadjda is a significant film from Saudi Arabia, a country that does not have any movie theatres. While the country has a bustling television industry, it has no filmmaking infrastructure in comparison. It is ... Read More »
With El Salvador-born and Mexico-based José Luis Valle and his debut feature film Workers, we are in the midst of an exciting, articulate, and moving filmmaker and vision. In the midst of the numerous films on issues of migration and the border (of which there are several screeni... Read More »
For those who are familiar with the Chilean filmmaker, visual artist, and musician Sebastián Silva, the subject of group dynamics as found in one of two films that he has recently made with the American actor Michael Cera, Crystal Fairy, should not be surprising. Such a subject h... Read More »
I.D. is the debut feature by writer-director Kamal K.M, who is originally from Kerala but currently based in Mumbai. The film is also the debut production of the Collective Phase One organisation, of which Kamal is one of the founding members. Alongside other independent Indian f... Read More »
Between the opening scenes of Louis Koo’s character Choi Tin-ming swerving his car in the streets and reeling and vomiting on himself at the wheel, the effects of an explosion at his cocaine factory, and the concluding scenes of Choi on an operating table being executed by inject... Read More »
In aviation parlance, ‘flying a hold’ refers to a tactic for a plane that is already in flight and is experiencing problems but cannot yet make an emergency landing until assigned a runway. Part of ‘flying a hold’ is flying the plane in an elliptical pattern as it waits for a run... Read More »
