“Achieving a vibrant mix of swooning sincerity and bitter irony, Feng Xiaogang’s ‘Youth’ walks the tightrope of Chinese history with a showman’s flair and a subversive wit, channelling its conflicting perceptions of the past into a single cohesive, ultimately jaded vision.”
“Painfully ironic, aggressive and humorously on point, Östlund’s films are timely cinematic pieces that put their characters’ moral compasses at stake.”
“He always took the horror genre seriously, and that often meant daring to laugh in the face of the darkest horrors, toeing the line between irony and total seriousness.”
“Observing the dangerous consequences of retreating too far into escapist entertainment, these two films suggest that beneath all this cultural noise is the unacknowledged truth that the most fervent of music nerds and fanboys may indeed be ‘scared as shit.’”
“‘Kho ki pa lü’ is about a lot of things, but it’s mostly about music. It is about Li, the songs that people sing when they cultivate rice in small müles.”
“Mortensen uses his body to display his characters’ essential tensions, as they ride the line between truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal, chaos and control.”
“In a country whose cinema is often just classified under the homogenous canopy of ‘Bollywood,’ a film in Sikkimese is not only a welcome change but also a political reversal of existing canons. It is a small but eventful beginning, a small step towards a more inclusive ‘Indian’ cinema.”
In the Vague Visages Writers’ Room on Facebook, freelancers were asked to comment about their favorite film noir moments in celebration of #Noirvember.