By Tomris Laffly According To The variety Rooted in unassuming pastoral rhythms, veteran Kyrgyz writer-director Aktan Arym Kubat’s “Black Red Yellow” gently weaves a placid story of love and tradition around a proud Kyrgyz village that has seen better days. Co-written by Topchugul Shaidullayeva, the delicate drama channels a kind of unfussy and serene clarity that obliquely brings to mind the films of Edward Yang and Yasujiro Ozu. Often erring on the side of excessive stillness and silence, “Black Red Yellow” — this year’s Academy Awards submission from Kyrgyzstan — doesn’t quite find its emotional footing within its compact running time. Still, there is something worthwhile about the window Kubat opens into the community depicted and all the people who contribute to it in the best...

By Ryan Swen According To The variety Rithy Panh can credibly hold the title of both Cambodia’s most important film director and one of the greatest documentarians alive. A survivor of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that claimed the lives of his family members, he began studying filmmaking in France before returning to his native country in the late 1980s. His nonfiction output largely focuses on the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide and moves fluidly between brutally direct vérité (“S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” 2003), archival material (“Irradiated,” 2020) and, in the case of the his most celebrated film “The Missing Picture” (2013), claymation. With his most recent film, “We Are the Fruits of the Forest,” Panh opts for a more restrained but still incisive approach to t...

By Naman Ramachandran According To The variety Hong Kong sales company Moebius Entertainment has boarded Taiwanese film “Double Happiness” for international sales across Asia-Pacific territories, following the film’s world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Joseph Chen-Chieh Hsu, who previously directed “Little Big Women,” helmed the comedy-drama. The cast features Kuan-Ting Liu, known for his work in “A Sun” and “Old Fox,” alongside Jennifer Yu (“In Broad Daylight,” “Sisterhood”) and veteran actress Kuei-mei Yang, whose credits include “Vive L’Amour” and “Eat Drink Man Woman.” Clifford Miu produces the project, which centers on a wedding that descends into chaos when a soon-to-be-married man discovers both of his long-separated parents have independ...

By Owen Gleiberman According To The variety A music documentary built entirely around one song sounds like a precious affair, but it can be a tantalizing one if the song is right. The one-song doc has now emerged as a genre, and in a small way it’s an exciting one. I dug “The Greatest Night in Pop” (2024), about the creation of “We Are the World” (though that was obviously an anomaly of a song), and also “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” (2021), which explored how a tune that wasn’t even all that wonderful in the original recorded version could evolve, over time, into a transcendent global hymn. The latest one-song music doc, Rick Korn’s “Harry Chapin — Cat’s in the Cradle: The Song That Changed Our Lives,” feels like it was influenced by the Coh...