Wong Chun’s Mad World depicts the harrowing consequences of stigmas about mental illness but fails to engage with the reality of mental illness in favour of an uplifting family narrative where love is just as good as medication. Mad World is screening at the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival.
Essays
Review: Tommy’s Honour is a showcase for the prodigiously talented Jack Lowden
In Tommy’s Honour, Jack Lowden finally gets the leading role he deserves as the eponymous Tommy Morris, the greatest golfer of the 19th century.
Review: Close-Knit marks an important milestone for Japanese LGBTQ cinema
Naoko Ogigami’s Close-Knit is a charming, if disappointingly conservative, family drama about a girl who finds herself being raised by a transgender woman.
All These Sleepless Nights is a mesmerizing look at youth culture in post-communist Poland
All These Sleepless Nights explores loneliness and liberation in a Poland finally free after decades of occupation and war.
Ghosts, grief, and objects left behind in Assayas’ Summer Hours and Personal Shopper
Olivier Assayas’ films Summer Hours and Personal Shopper are united by their portrayal of the recently bereaved confronting what the dead did, or did not, leave behind.
‘No desire if it’s not forbidden’: Dread, eroticism, and text messaging in Personal Shopper
By using text messaging as a source of terror that morphs into eroticism, Personal Shopper acknowledges and subverts horror traditions.