Review: 'Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell' is one of the best movies of this young year

There's a single-take sequence in "Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell" that, over roughly 20 minutes and less than a mile's journey, seems to distill a small corner of eternity. We are somewhere in the Vietnamese countryside, where a soft-spoken young man named Thiên (Le Phong Vu) is sent on an errand by a friend. A different filmmaker might have cut straight to the errand, or perhaps the outcome of the errand, or even kept the errand and this entire conversation about the errand off-screen. But the director, Pham Thiên Ân, does none of these things. Instead he reminds us that even the most seemingly insignificant moments — and there is nothing insignificant in the world of this patient, gorgeous, quietly spellbinding movie — can open a gateway to the sublime.

Pham shows us the errand in full: After talking to his friend,