Sets of dramatic images, often shot at bizarre, slanted angles in a broadly dark cinematography, blatantly messing with timelines and circumstances, are edited in rapid fire, stirring confusion and getting the audience lost, without clues and a clear narrative direction, even as they step into this…

Of course, there is the issue of what could happen to their daughter. The wife wants the girl to travel with her, the husband does not – that closes the case, as his approval is required. But the biggest issue is Nader’s father: he has the Alzheimer’s disease and his son looks after him in his apartment (his…

The film features the tropes of a road movie but if the white SUV rides endlessly dirty roads it remains in fact inside a small area, going on round circles, winding through the same hairpin bends, driving along the same quarries. The point is not to reach another destination or to explore a new land and…

It begins as a feminist statement. Realizing with embarrassment and surprise she has never fully owned her life, never had anything belonging to her, never carved out a place of her own, Lucy Muir, after a year spent, as demanded by tradition and property, mourning her beloved husband…

Coming out of the shadows, quite literally as the camera shots her for the first time standing against a door in poorly-lit passage leading to the back facade of a New York theater after an evening performance, Eve Harrington proves swiftly apt at winning the trust of people who would…

This is the world of the forest. Tall and awesome, even in the dead of the winter, trees are everywhere, spreading to the horizon, surrounding you at every turn, keeping cities away from your mind. When you look up, tilt your head backward, lie on the ground, the sky becomes a richly…

Sook-hee is a member of a family of petty thieves surviving without much trouble under the Japanese occupation in the 1930s Korea. Among her sidekicks there is so-called Count Fujiwara. The aristocrat offers her to take part in an ambitious scheme: helping him to marry…

Splatter of blood on a rock and on a face: this is the grisly end of a rape as a young woman from the countryside fights back the two blacksmiths who have assaulted her and her best friend. Blood, however, would not get staunched in the course of Myeong-ja’s life…

A mundane scene of domestic life: a husband and his wife argue over a newspaper report about a man who fell in love with his maid, causing a scandal, while their two children play cat’s cradle amazingly fast. They are in a cozy room, nicely furnished and decorated, the husband wears fashionable…

The film credits appear during a long, elaborate, sequence shot both in black and white and in colors showing a young woman talking to a fortune teller. The soothsayer tries to make sense of the tarot cards while her client starts panicking. It turns out the pretty young woman’s…

A farm worker finds in a ditch the frozen corpse of a young woman seemingly in her 20s early in the morning of a winter day in the French department of Gard, which lies along the Mediterranean sea. Members of the local gendarmerie briefly examine the place and interrogate a few persons before…

As the camera glides over a stately white facade featuring sculptures while the film’s titles roll, the voices the soundtrack plays relate a bizarre trial, with a woman pleading a judge to punish her husband after he broke a mirror, bringing bad luck to their home and life, while the husband blames her for the…

A world of ruins: the smooth aerial shot surveys endless rows of half-demolished buildings; then the camera swoops down to sway around a towering wrecking ball, and then lands on the ground, amid the rubble and a construction site’s stuff and machines, including a bulldozer from which jumps out a gang…

It started as a typical conflict between families and political allegiances in the 13th and 14th century Italy, in this case in Verona, which was turned into a literary work in the 15th century by some Italian writers. The narrative became then the source of plays, including in Spain, and it is was in the…

The titles are an obvious throwback to the period where the genres of crime stories, gangster films, and film noirs were emerging as defining and popular productions of the American cinema, new features capturing the public imagination, churning out stars, widening the range of the movies in terms…