Chronicling the life and romantic trajectory of a postwar beauty queen named Qiyao (Sammi Cheng) over the span of forty years, Stanley Kwan’s epic period drama, Everlasting Regret is a film about unrealized ambition and missed opportunity in more ways than one. The film cuts broad, elliptical swaths across Chinese post-revolution history through Qiyao’s childhood […]
Underground begins on a deceptively lyrical, unassuming note: “Once upon a time, there was a country.” On the evening of April 6, 1941, two drunken profiteers, Marko (Miki Manojlovic) and Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) celebrate their latest caper – the theft of a government arms shipment – accompanied by a raucous, obliging gypsy band. However, their […]
Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies is a curious, visually hypnotic film: a lyrical glimpse into an exotic, obscure culture, a tragedy of lost innocence, a reaffirmation of love and family. At the center of the story is a young man named Perhan (Davor Dujmovic) who lives in a Gypsy ghetto with his grandmother (Ljubica […]
During the turbulent political climate of 1950 Sarajevo, as the nascent socialist federation of Yugoslavia under Marshall Josip Tito began to exert its independence from the Soviet Union, young Malik’s (Moreno de Bartolli) only pressing concern is to earn enough money with his best friend Joza in order to buy a genuine leather football and […]
After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future. As the film begins, the family patriarch, middle-aged senior administrative manager, Ryuhei […]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brooding, atmospheric, surreal, and sufficiently creepy, but woefully underformed and uncharacteristically messy horror film, Retribution unfolds with the formulaic familiarity of a haphazardly (and irregularly) sutured career retrospective digest. A rumpled and overworked detective, Yoshioka (Kôji Yakusho) and his partner Miyaji (Tsuyoshi Ihara) are called in to investigate the apparent murder by drowning […]