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“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell”

I have watched many films since this time last year, when, at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a film so startling in its visual assuredness, bearing a deep sense of longing and regret, froze me where I sat. It is a ruminative piece that, coincidentally, travels beyond the body into dreams and memories. It begins when Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ) witnesses the death of his sister-in-law in a motorcycle crash that renders her son Doa (Nguyễn Thịnh) the lone survivor. Thiện ventures back to his tiny village with Dao and her body, ostensibly to bury her, but in reality to search for his long-lost brother. 

The director of this film crafts a three-hour journey that reopens the scars of war and ignites love’s angst and the ecstasy of religion, enveloping the viewer in a sonorous jungle where very little light seems to enter. The camera moves through this meditative space with the style of Michelangelo Antonioni and the observationalism of Robert Bresson until it lands, with Thien, peacefully in a stream. A frightening unguardedness was required to make this picture, the kind that overwhelmed me. Since KVIFF, my world has spun again. And I have watched many films. But none have affected me like Pham Thien An’s spiritual feature debut: “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” – Robert Daniels

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“Love Lies Bleeding”

A woman’s strength depicted in cinema is often in reference to resilience, care, and perseverance: the force of their spirits. Rose Glass leaves no room for interpretation in “Love Lies Bleeding” when she demands we bear witness to the brawn of women in all its sexy consequence and delicious chaos.

Lou (Kristen Stewart) is a keep-to-her-self gym manager in the kind of town you only pass through, and this is exactly what bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brien) is doing. Fueled by ambition to win a bodybuilding competition in Vegas, Jackie stops through to sleep, train, and make a little money to help her on her way. When they encounter each other at the gym, a meet-cute by the weights evolves into a feverish, hair-trigger love affair that collides with the criminal underworld by way of Lou’s father (Ed Harris). With his menacing criminal calm bashing heads against Jackie’s roid rage and Lou’s anxious and sporadic decision-making, “Love Lies Bleeding” is an action-packed fever dream with all the markers of a cult classic noir, money, sex, and violence, done the Rose Glass way.