The crime remains so notorious in the town that, at one point, a longtime neighbor who resides by the now-shuttered family grocery refuses to discuss it with the director or even appear on camera, no matter the demises of its key players and the gains of various, Black-led Southern movements.
Several films on view continued to reckon, indirectly or otherwise, and to varying degrees of success, with our era of disrupted intimacy and heightened loneliness. Titles include Quickening, The Humans, and The Power of the Dog.
The TIFF Wavelengths program remains an essential overview of the goings-on in contemporary experimental cinema. Titles include Polycephaly in D, Dear Chantal, Inner Outer Space, The Capacity for Adequate Anger, and more.
Ulman is best known for multi-platform performances that encompass social media, installations, and even adjacent press coverage. The idea of being “based in airports” defies background context in a way that “New York–based,” her current status, would not.
As La Linda, Tillich, and The Kid move through city after city, facing down unlovely rooms and unsatisfying conclusions, Tillich is forced to realize that it is not always possible to salve the old wounds, to regain lost innocence, or to temper the impulsive violence of young American men seemingly hellbent on destruction.
Faulkner evokes our uncomfortable relationship to the fascism that sits at the core of many games, a Pavlovian dopamine rush meant to mimic the very actions that imperialist militaries use to oppress, control, and murder in the name of jingoistic glory, and subversively offers an alternative path of interaction.
As a 2016 film about the 1950s studio system, Hail, Caesar! reminds us that Hollywood has always been a place of myth and self-congratulation, a dream factory that feigns progressiveness while serving national and hegemonic interests.
Isabella has films within films, plays within plays, and people within people. As in its central mise en abyme, the director creates an abyss of rhyme and recurrence. His mode of adaptation works reflexively, where these layers upon layers lead to a sense of collapse.
Although one cannot say Candyman shies away from body horror, DaCosta judiciously wields this imagery to meaningfully express the psychological and physical legacies that Black communities inherit, bonded by these tales of terror, which are, in fact, history.
Cryptozoo is set at a moment in time when the U.S. military was getting increasingly involved in the ongoing Vietnam War. Forget Agent Orange; what if cryptids were used as involuntary weaponry?
In this first, five-minute shot of his new film, Days, Tsai Ming-liang reminds us again of why this once youthful but eternally sorrowful man, now in his early fifties, is among the great muses of what we once called cinema.
If Ema is ostensibly fighting for another chance at motherhood, she is also struggling to assert her own individuality over and against a system that has already decided the place she ought to occupy (on stage and at home).
Many recent musicals have tried to ground themselves in realism or history itself, rarely breaking away to indulge in spectacle and never commenting on their approach to storytelling. Carax and Sparks, by contrast, aim to expose the artifice inherent in their production.
"You participate in the narration of the film with the light, with the ambience, with the climat of the image. So, the image is not only a technical performance, it is part of the storytelling, it participates in the narration. And that is the deepest definition, I think, for cinematography."
"As humans, we always want the fireworks. We want the show. But actually a volcano is always erupting. And, as is also true about cinema, the more you learn about the language of a director, the more you can appreciate the idiosyncrasies or the details."