Eschewing the use of talking heads or a slate of statistics, director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the narrative largely from police bodycam footage—arguably the true crime idiom of the 2020s, taking the premise of Cops (1989–present) to its optimized conclusion: law enforcement is the camera crew.
The Candid Camera–style, “gotcha” approach has appealed to a new wave of online predator hunters: streamers who transpose the TCaP framework to YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, and Locals. Many of these shows are hosted by survivors, or people one step removed from them.
Like late Ozu, with his parade of seasonally titled shomin-geki exploring the practically endless permutations of family life, Father Mother Sister Brother is a series of intergenerational vignettes.
Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to its questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water.
Magellan is one of the few films to cover this episode of the Age of Discovery, and Lav Diaz uses this stab at a grand seafaring spectacular to reject the idea that white colonialists “discovered” anything at all.
These games represent the beginning of a new era in Kojima’s output. With Death Stranding, Kojima affirmed that he would be doubling or tripling down on conceptual oddness.
A grotesque and grimly funny freak-out that unfolds with the hurtling momentum of a runaway train, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You marks the reemergence of its long dormant writer-director.
Between its compositional dynamism and picaresque sensibility, the film is an auteur work to the core; it is also enervating in ways that do not so much undermine the stylistic pyrotechnics as indicate they’re the source of the problem.
The very existence of this brash film, which reveals the hearts of darkness at the center of Cuba’s cultural institutions, is proof that creative expression may be hindered, or sometimes stalled, but it can never be stopped.
In the mid-2010s, Hideo Kojima created two video games: P.T. (2014) and Metal Gear Solid V (2015). Both of them were released incomplete as a result of his crumbling relationship with Konami. Yet they are nevertheless landmark works whose influence is still felt a decade later.
SVT trends towards paternal humanitarian coverage of Palestine during the First and Second Intifada. Unseen throughout, however, is how television was shaped by sociohistorical eras.
Alboury will not come inside, and he will not go home, either; the more the two men try to feel each other out, the less likely it becomes that one or the other is going to budge. This is a compelling setup, sociologically and emotionally loaded.
Kojima encourages the player to hold back on inflicting violence on others. His continued preference for a non-lethal approach to combat (prioritizing stealth) is built into both games.
For all our anxieties around the obsolescence of the medium, Bi Gan is moved by an unwavering belief in its subversive powers. Resurrection is not a valentine so much as a manifesto, a rousing wake-up call to all that cinema can still do.
Kojima’s web of historical, scientific and artistic allusions obscures the border between “high” and “low” art, or “art” and “entertainment,” that remains common in discussions of games’ artistic legitimacy.