★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★★ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
