Poliakoff had a great run at the BBC as a screenwriter of an especially subdued brand of psychological thriller, and this is a particularly droll riff on Cold War spy games. Holm’s Russian diplomat is so convinced his posting in London must mean something that he turns the city into a paranoid landscape of signs and wonders, obsessively watching out for all the watchers he’s sure are out there after him (“I’m like a camera lens, as one of your…

Ruiz pondering the relationship between anthropology and neocolonialism, boldly colored lens filters and global-north myopia, Lacanian psychology and petit-bourgeois onanism, language loss and globalized flatness. “The world is contained in sixty words. Each implies the whole in its perspective.” One of the film’s funniest jokes is that the actual anthropologist ends up crushed by the effort of saving the last living members of this imagined lost tribe of Patagonia, while everyone else is happy enough to either tame the wilds…

A struggling hit man’s desperate gambit to keep his clients happy rendered as a gleefully amoral satire of the Hong Kong film industry’s turn-of-the-millennium growing pains. Not the least of the film’s myriad sites of critique is an audience hungry for the over-produced and the exaggeratedly unreal, the women who want video verification of the hits they’ve ordered demanding ever higher production standards and immersive staging (“You’re better than Scorsese!”). If the film’s industry insiders make it plain that the…

Scrappy post-collapse mood piece from Jia Zhangke’s DP; humanist sci-fi that imagines a devastated future by simply turning its camera on the devastated post-industrial wastelands of its own contemporary China. “Worship the future, despite the present,” goes the credo of the shadowy cult that seems to have taken power across East Asia, citizens sent off to reeducation camps to teach them the ways of bearing reality’s impoverishments for the vague promise of some future redemption. But as a handful of…

“A kiss of no consequences?” A hyper-literate series of musings on attraction and friendship and lust that would be merely inoffensively trite if the narrative itself weren’t driven along by the worst sort of nice guy passive-aggressive misogyny. The sort of film that can imagine an intense platonic friendship between a man and a woman, but only with, it turns out, the unspoken caveat that when he finds himself very lonely and horny, he can turn to her for help.…

“I’m just trying to help a lassie out.” Loach working in the mode of something like old-school adventure yarn; the kindly, anti-authoritarian Glaswegian bus driver finding his one good deed spiriting him away to the bloody intensity of wartime on the other side of the world. The right-wing, CIA-backed contras’ vicious war against the Sandinistas is handled with a kind of nightmarish, live-wire immediacy, even as Loach never abandons the gentle, lived-in humanism he’d established between his central pair back…

Sho Miyake’s first film was a gorgeously low-stakes evocation of aimless youth; though in adapting his specific brand of low-budget character drama to the world of a deaf boxer, he can’t help but collapse a bit under the weight of all the inherited sentimental baggage. The boxer’s story may have actually happened in the early 2010s, but in updating her exploits to the Covid era, whatever production constraints Miyake may have been trying to compensate for are overshadowed by all…

Yanagimachi’s sympathies have always been with those on the outside of mainstream Japanese society – its malcontents, its mad prophets of doom, its dispossessed and ignored – to the point where the latter chapter of his career finds him simply leaving Japan behind entirely. His fascination with a group of snake charmers and medicine peddlers in Taiwan, a group whose name literally translates to “a moving society,” becomes but another way to diagnose late-modern life by celebrating its rejection; these…

“And that’s what can happen to you for talking to a strange woman in the street.” Larry Cohen spins a kind of modern New York urban legend from scratch, Roberts’ smooth-talking playboy finding himself descending into a feverish whirlwind of paranoia and medical malpractice; a series of ever more ludicrous clues leading him to this shadowy underworld of diabetics and the madmen whisking them away, the ambulance itself “a vehicle of mercy that’s really a murder machine.” “Were they all…

A jittery, booze-fueled state of the nation from Switzerland, one long night’s tour through Bern’s beer halls and music clubs as a bourgeois radio journalist rattles the cages of his own comfort and complacency. “Every human being has the right to same happiness, the president said.” Dreams of 1968 curdled into smugly dismissing the uselessness of protest, ambitions of doing something that might actually matter turning into the well-behaved cog in the machine. “Let’s emigrate to the jungle and open…

Early character portrait from Gopalakrishnan that for much of its run time feels like a kind of slacker tone poem, a song in praise of those holy innocents who do nothing much worthwhile aside from consistently being simply good; that joyously helping a group of children retrieve their kite from a tree is probably more important in the long run that whatever it is most call work. “After all, the life you live is an illusion!” But the harder Sankarankutty’s…