Exclusive articles:
Hors Satan | Review
Bruno Dumont Returns To The Austere Mode of His First Two Features For A Wicked View of Spirituality
Isabelle Huppert Set To Be Stripped Bare By Hong Sang-soo
Some auteurs grace cinephiles with their gifts only about has frequently as there are national elections (or if you're Terrence Malick, with the election of each new pope), and then there are guys like Hong Sang-soo, whose personal agenda seems to be: appear in as many major film festivals as possible until they cease to exist. Having just debuted one of his very best features, The Day He Arrives, in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section last May, he's now back to work on a new feature - though who's to say that he doesn't already have another new one in the can?
Review: Arirang
"Kim Ki-duk, one of South Korea's premiere - and most prolific - arthouse filmmakers for the last two decades, has, with his new film Arirang, assembled a diary that helps to explain why we haven't seen any new projects from him since 2008's Dream. Turning the camera on himself for 100 insufferable minutes, this is the kind of narcissistic woe-is-me claptrap that gives the Video Diary genre an unnecessarily bad name..."
Arirang | Review
Kim Ki-duk Films His Whiny Self-Help Therapies, Thinks Someone Else Wants To Watch
2011 Midway Point: Blake’s Top 10
#10. Play - Ruben Östlund (Cannes 2011)
Riveting, harrowing, infuriating. Never has adolescent bullying and manipulation been so watchably mundane. Östlund has clearly got this meandering realism down to a T; applying it to a clearer form and purpose has its ups and downs in comparison to his previous, more free-form film, Involuntary. Borrows, and expands on, the better moments of Haneke's Code Unknown, which is to say: he understands the depressing impossibility of inter-cultural unity.
