Film Inquiry

1 week ago | filminquiry.com | Lee Jutton

One thing is for certain about the genre-defying cinematic oeuvre of Tsui Hark: it has energy. After all, you don’t feel invigorated by the violent nihilism of Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, the madcap action comedy of Peking Opera Blues, or the martial arts madness of Once Upon a Time in China and its sequels, you must be sleepwalking through life, or at the very least cinema.

1 week ago | filminquiry.com | Clement Tyler Obropta

One of life’s cruelest inevitabilities is that the people we love most grow old and die. And unfortunately, the final years of our lives also happens to be when we’re at our most vulnerable — when our minds are slower, our memories faded and confused, and our bodies infirm. And where there are vulnerable people, there are greedy private equity firms circling like vultures.

2 weeks ago | filminquiry.com | Soham Gadre

I’ll come clean right up front and say that this has never been my kind of movie. The archetype of the hopeless romantic loner somehow finding love with not just one but multiple people in the perfect and most idealistic way they could have imagined is the antithesis of how I would consider relatable feelings on love and also being alone.

3 weeks ago | filminquiry.com | Wilson Kwong

In what feels like a very natural fit, I’ll be pairing together two of the festival’s opening films as part of my Cannes 2025 coverage: Leave One Day (Partir un Jour), the festival’s opening film at large, and Enzo, which opens up the festival’s sidebar Directors’ Fortnight program. Neither film served as the strongest start to this year’s festival, but both have interesting elements to them nonetheless.

3 weeks ago | filminquiry.com | Clement Tyler Obropta

Something happened to Wes Anderson. Twenty years ago, he was the new auteur on the block. With indie hits like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, he established a distinctive style, one of charming, well-written, complex characters; whimsical and dogmatically stylized compositions; unique color palettes; and witty scripts crackling with dry humor. He has beyond a doubt the most recognizable aesthetic style in contemporary cinema. But lately, his work has fallen off — at least for me.