Popular reviews

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  Review by J L ★★★★★ 11

  Apichatpong Weerasethakul has long held that audiences are allowed to sleep during his movies, and at his New York career retrospective earlier this year, expanded that “sleep is very close to cinema: the collective dreaming.” Well, Apichatpong-heads, we may have met his true successor. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, an unbelievable directorial debut by Vietnamese director Pham Thien An, is Weerasethakul’s cinema or slow cinema on steroids—at a gargantuan 182-minute runtime, even longer, even more beguiling, and at many times, literally hallucinatory.

  Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell begins with a very open and explicit questioning of spirituality that takes place at a dinner table. Between three friends, Thien is the one who’s most lost in whether he believes in a…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★½ 59

  The soul longs to emerge from its chrysalis and fly. Transcendence as metamorphosis in a seam of reality, letting go of past loves and questions left unanswered, washed in the waters of grace. A world wide open wherein you are free to float between realms—cradled in the arms of nature. Minutes tick away unseen on a long walk home, not knowing where you’re going but not caring. Cinema is spiritualism in disguise, and space is the hiding place of time.

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 14

  In the end, submerge. Stay still, be caught in your own cocoon, chasing something you won't ever find. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a film about trying to satisfy the soul and losing oneself to an unfixable state of being. It is about a man journeying to reconnect with family, only to end up examining his own past. With streaks of Weerasethakul's spiritual beauty and Diaz's lengthy complexity, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a slow and contemplative effort about faith and the soul. It keeps characters at a distance, with camerawork that stays away from them and shows them through gaps. Some shots start as a dream and then come back to reality. The film is filled with…

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  Review by Jon Dieringer ★★½ 6

  Knockout first 30 mins or so, then it gradually dawns on you that you are watching the Christian rock equivalent of slow cinema. Uncle Boonmee Goes to Jesus Camp.

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  Review by Frances Meh ★★★★ 1

  when a film is this beautiful i can forgive any flaw, even christianity

  
  
  

  
  ~ Toronto International Film Festival #19 ~
  

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★ 1

  my patience for slow cinema greater than it used to be but this is pretty trying, all considered. I always tend to feel more involved when the audience starts to turn on a movie like this, perhaps because I am best motivated out of spite. make way for ducklings, etc. crazy what he got those water buffalo to do

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  Review by Marooned Hiếu ★★★★ 2

  Apter title: Stay Asleep, Be Dreamy

  Lots of bold, odd choices, including these strange detours (road vlog dream, rooster shot, old man telling war stories, the final hour?). The camerawork, sound mixing (particularly in the scenes with the TV noise), and (if there is) animal choreography are miraculous achievements. Could do it without the score and the pro-life sentiment though, and kinda wish that like its influences - Tarkovsky, Bi Gan, Tsai Ming-liang - there's more fruitfulness in a more condensed runtime. Still, a beautiful, contemplative, soul-soothing mood piece. We need at least 10 more of these every year to make up for the 𝘵𝘳ă𝘮 𝘵ỷ brainrot entertainment.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★½ 3

  Film festival neoacademicism handled with some care, with all the right references, but the spiritual awakening remains a little proposed. It does use its large scope of time and ambient to achieve some force.

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  Review by john ★★★

  Me and the homies are just tryna transcend and heal, man.

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  Review by Ayush ★★★★★ 13

  Of death and dreams.

  Clouds mourn as misfortune takes the soul away from the body. The child is puzzled, and the man at a loss. Inquisitive questions arise about a world away from ours, but answers can't be had with conviction.

  The man's odyssey away from the urban maze and into the once-familiar cradle of mother nature transcends into a meeting point between reality and fantasy, the past and the present.

  Eyes close and open; worlds converge. A dreamy haze of segues blur the lines between what's real and what wants to be real. Everlasting fog envelopes the man's surroundings as he sees his own self of months or years past; reminiscences of the love that got away. He asks questions and sees people that lead him none the closer in his search for another man.

  Submerged in the evanescent embrace of memories both real and not, he finds solace in the water.

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  Review by Ashlea💧🦎 🐜 ★★★★½ 2

  I love it when a film fucks with me. The director is a cool guy.

  The catholic faith themes may be off-putting to some, but I connected with the director on his journey to self-discovery, reconnecting with his roots and re-examining the direction of his life. It’s a sensual film upheld by the physicality of Le Phong Vu (a natural) with some underrated acting—the tale of Uncle Thien on a quest to find his long-lost brother running into existential hurdles along the way. I won’t apologise for quietly adoring it—a delicious and devilish mystery of the divine.

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  Review by Robert Daniels ★★★★½ 1

  Days since the credits rolled on Pham Thien An’s enrapturing feature debut, “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” his expansively rendered intimate vision continues to shake, evade, and bend me. An’s tome poem film—winner of Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d'Or—works on every possible visual and sonic level. 

  It begins on an invigorating note, with a tracking shot that moves from a soccer game to a Saigon sports bar where Thien (Le Phong Vu) and his buddies sit and debate the practicality of spirituality. A sharp gust of wind and a curtain of rain, seemingly emanating from a divine will, picks up, causing a motorbike to crash. Thien later learns that his sister-in-law died in that accident, leaving her son orphaned. The…