★★★★☆ A masterful adaptation of British author Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden transplants the action from Victorian England to Korea and Japan, but the sense of gothic sexual hypocrisy and feminist fightback thankfully remains.Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) is a Korean artful dodger, a famed pickpocket whose Continue Reading
★★★★★ Indian master Satyajit Ray once said that music was more important to him than his beloved cinema. In the director’s The Music Room, re-released under the UK’s Criterion Collection label this week, his passion for the former and mastery of the latter is clear. Based on a Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A whip-smart, moving comedy of family and community, Annemarie Jacir’s third feature Wajib sees a father and son embark on a day-long odyssey around Nazareth hand-delivering wedding invitations. In the process, they discover the complexity of their own relationship. Shadi (Saleh Bakri) returns to Nazareth from Italy for the Continue Reading
From Danny Zuko in Grease, Tyler Durden in Fight Club and Gilda, Rita Hayworth’s character from the film of the same name, the smoking of a cigarette has been used in Hollywood and beyond to depict everything from being cool and edgy, as hard as nails, or classy and sassy. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Isabelle Huppert stars as a beleaguered French science teacher who, following a lightning strike, sporadically transforms into a fire lady. Serge Bozon’s absurdist revision of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale has some wonderful moments but doesn’t quite je kill it.Madame Gequil (Huppert) works in the Arthur Rimbaud High School and Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A young couple Ji-young (Kim Sae-byeok) and Su-hyeon (Cho Hyun-chul) reach a decisive moment in their lives in South Korean Kim Dae-hwan’s impressive slow-burner The First Lap, which received its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival last week.South Korea is at a crossroads, embroiled in political demonstrations Continue Reading