-
Continue reading →: TIFF ’24 Review: Cloud“I know a lot of people here love my film Cure, this film is not much like that,” said Kiyoshi Kurosawa before TIFF’s premiere of his newest feature, Cloud. He’s speaking the truth, the film is nothing like that hypnotic masterpiece, but not in any pejorative sense. In fact, 1997…
-
Continue reading →: TIFF ’24 Review: Caught by the TidesJia Zhangke’s breakthrough masterpiece Platform from 2000 follows a youthfully vibrant theatre troop travelling and performing around China, in whatever form on whatever stage they can. It was a deeply personal panorama of shifting social-political currents and an elegiac dedication to art itself. That film concludes in the late 90s…
-
Continue reading →: Grand Tour: A Post-Colonial AdventureWinner of the Best Director award at Cannes this year, Grand Tour is a kaleidoscopic journey of post-colonial melancholia about people trying to catch up to something that has been long gone or never existed in the first place. It splices between time and space, scenes shot on studio soundstages and contemporary…
-
Continue reading →: Best Films of 2024, So Far…In terms of cinema, the first six months of the year are always tricky. For one, studios usually choose to push their potential critics’ darlings to the back half of the year for better awards prospects. The summer blockbuster season is already heating up, but with the disruption of Hollywood…
-
Continue reading →: Retro-review: Fat GirlIn Fat Girl, Breillat employs a naturalistic approach to telling the abrasive coming-of-age journey of two sisters. Her observation style strikes a fine balance between sordid provocation and stone-cold surveillance. The best example is the bedroom long takes of the 15-year-old Elena being lured, peer-pressured and sweet-talked into having sex…
-
Continue reading →: Review: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the WorldDo Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a brazenly iconoclastic political manifesto made by someone who really hates Romanian traffic. It’s a significant improvement from Radu Jude’s previous Golden Bear winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn for being a lot less self-indulgent and having a more fluid…
-
Continue reading →: The Hypnotic Nightmare of Evil Does Not ExistsThroughout his directing career, Ryusuke Hamaguchi always has an interest in grasping the murk between pretension and authentic human emotions. In Asako I&II, he asks the same actor to portray behaviourally opposite love interests to muffle the relationship between unattainable love and mundane love. In Wheel of Fortune of Fantasy, human connections…
-
Continue reading →: In theatres: Civil WarAlex Garland, like the war photographers he presents in Civil War, is deeply invested and allured by crafting horrifying images. Like them, 1 out of every 30 images he pumps out is amazing (the other 29 not so much), and perhaps this muffled version of the United States aptly reflects the…
-
Continue reading →: Thoughts on The SettlersThe Settlers, Chile’s submission for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards, is a gruesome look at the country’s bloody foundation through gnarly, picturesque landscapes and the disturbed minds that wandered through them. It is a revisionist western that reflects on its country’s hideous ways of sanitizing its history…
-
Continue reading →: The ArtistThe Artist has exactly one trick up its sleeve, it’s a silent film in 2011, and it plays it plainly and uninventively. From my shamefully limited experience watching silent classics, the film feels incredibly tamed and derivative when compared to those. The physical performances lacks a kinetic rhythm and the actors…
Welcome to Cinema Travelogue
If we consider the overview of the world of cinema as a map, then the voyage to connect the scattered dots in between is what we’re invested in. Serge Daney once described voyage as ‘without luggage, totally self-sufficient in his dispossession’. Being a citizen of world cinema is to abandon the luggage of predefined cultural expectations and meet each film and each filmmaker on their own cinematographic terms. If you are down for this journey, please consider subscribing to this travelogue.
Tag on for the ride!
Stay updated with our latest weekly reviews of classics and new releases
Cinema Travelogue 