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“I Believe My Instinct”: Tony Leung and Ildikó Enyedi on Silent Friend
The Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai has worked with some of cinema’s most accomplished directors. Known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-wai and John Woo, Leung has also appeared in films by Johnnie To, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou. Most recently, he appeared in Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, which finds characters interacting with a single German ginkgo tree in three disparate years: 1908, 1972, and 2020. Leung plays a neuroscientist during the final third, whose research on newborn brain activity is halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During this professional sojourn, he becomes fond of the […]
by Daniel Eagan on May 12, 2026 -
“Like a Surveillance Camera”: Christian Petzold on Miroirs No. 3
Following a fatal car crash in the countryside that leaves her injured and her boyfriend dead, Laura (Paula Beer), a pianist visiting from Berlin, is nursed back to health over several days by Betty (Barbara Auer), a quiet woman who lives near the crash site. Through carefully placed moments of subtle exposition, German filmmaker Christian Petzold slowly reveals to the viewer the extent to which Betty (who seemingly lives alone, but then…not) needs Laura to be a part of her daily life. Much of the fun of Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 then comes in the mysterious yet heartbreaking ways the […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 30, 2026 -
Talk Is Cheap: Radu Jude on Kontinental ’25
From Pearl White’s Perils of Pauline to Antonioni’s aimless, quasi-somnambulant heroines, the wandering woman has a venerable history in cinema. The figure has given filmmakers a vehicle for formal experimentation and narrative risk and stories organized less around destination than duration, encounter, and drift. With Kontinental ’25, Radu Jude continues his exploration of wandering women, this time through Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff reeling after the suicide of her most recent evictee—a former athlete turned squatter living in abandoned buildings in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Guilt or shame? Humiliation or distress? Jude doesn’t delineate Orsolya’s feelings so much as […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Mar 27, 2026
