The Rolling Family, 2004

The Rolling Family is characteristic of the recent wave of Argentinean novo cinema to have hit international shores in the past few years: decentralized and organic narrative, ensemble hybrid casting of professional and non-professional actors that lends itself to muted expressivity (albeit with occasionally spirited outbursts) and contextually immersed, overlapping dialogue, and deliberately paced observations […]

Dogville, 2003

Lars von Trier’s films have always had a polarizing effect, and I’ll acknowledge that, after having seen several of his major works (Zentropa, Element of Crime, Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, and Dancer in the Dark), I’ve always been in the detractors’ camp. The consummate provocateur’s latest film, Dogville, is no exception: an over-the-top, emotionally manipulative […]

Goodbye Dragon Inn, 2003

Perhaps Tsai’s lightest and most thematically distilled and minimalist film to date, Goodbye Dragon Inn pares the dialogue to two brief exchanges that reflect the film’s pervasive sentiment of disconnection: the first, with a displaced Japanese tourist (Kiyonobu Mitamura) cursorily on the lookout for opportunities for an anonymous sexual encounter in the dilapidated, near empty […]

Sweet Rush, 2009

Part coming of age story set in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, and part personal testament by lead actress Krystyna Janda on her husband, Edward Klosinski’s battle with cancer during filming, Andrzej Wajda’s poignant, if disarticulated Sweet Rush, on the surface, suggests kinship with the metacinema of Abbas Kiarostami in exploring the interpenetration between […]

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010

Like Mija in Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, the eponymous, ailing protagonist of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is similarly haunted by memory and mortality. Retiring to a secluded country estate to live out his final days in the company of concerned family and friends (as well as a devoted Laotian illegal […]