A work of quiet introspection that somehow feels as vast as the universe.

| Jan 7, 2025

The Caméra d’Or-winning Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell struggles to fully deliver on its initial promise of haunting, exploratory slow cinema.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 3, 2024

Wanderers are everywhere. Less common are movies as precisely and beautifully crafted as Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.

| Aug 22, 2024

Thien An mounts compositions that suggest the Vietnamese countryside to be a heavenly, transitional realm. But the characters don’t open up to us, and so the film never becomes more than a technical achievement.

| Jul 10, 2024

There’s not a frame of the movie that’s a bore to look at, even if it requires a good dose of patience to view the scenes collectively.

| Jul 5, 2024

Ready comparisons would be to the work of elusive Asian visionaries Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang and perhaps the obstinately steady cadences within the body of work of the great Greek Theo Angelopoulos. It’s a most elegant simmer and soak

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 2, 2024

It will make a great 'existential road trip double feature' with Bi Gan's debut Kaili Blues.

| May 21, 2024

Although strangely immersing, not everyone will be invested in the questions it poses.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 25, 2024

Connected to his suggestive imagination and sense of carnality, Pham Thien An offers us faith with a beauty that it's at times rapturous. [Full review in Spanish]

| Apr 5, 2024

A lyrical and immersive journey that explores and connects life's mysteries with the wounds of a haunting past and the significance of faith. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 3, 2024

As reality and illusion blur, they are intimations of the spiritual lurking beneath the mundane that nudge the protagonist on his path to belief -- or its renunciation.

| Mar 27, 2024

The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 5, 2024

With a run time of three hours, An Pham’s film definitely qualifies as slow cinema, but his long, deliberate takes are mesmerizing and reinforce his themes of faith, family and nature.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 4, 2024

...thrums in that liminal space between the immanent and the transcendent.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 4, 2024

Thi锚n embodies the contentment we all seek while feeling constrained within, as the title states, a yellow cocoon, that is, a highly restrictive environment from which to emerge, metamorphosized like a butterfly.

| Feb 2, 2024

The artistry of this gentle, hypnagogic odyssey is undeniable.

| Feb 1, 2024

It's a slow roll, very much about the images, language, thoughts and ideas.

| Feb 1, 2024

The entire film is marked by the brilliant cinematographic language used by its director and screenwriter Ph岷 Thi锚n 脗n, who, in his first long-term work, displays an impressive and calm handling of images. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 30, 2024

Though less overtly magical-realist than Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul鈥檚 cinema, this has a similar lyrical opacity, meditative pace, and slippery relationship towards present-tense reality.

| Jan 27, 2024

Pham achieves something rare: We almost feel each moment attaching to the next. On and on and on again, as the movie seeps into consciousness.

| Jan 26, 2024