Enys Men feels as stubborn and solid as the stone monolith perched at the edge of its desolate setting; the cinematic equivalent of a modest yet immovable object, an impassive and ruggedly beautiful site of contemplation.
The film is bolstered chiefly by the cast of nonprofessional actors, who together form an entirely authentic unit, feeding off one another’s energy for better or worse.
Unrest exists at the confluence two crucial historical currents. Its title refers to the part of a watch known as the unrueh or balance wheel, whose oscillations regulate the entire mechanism, and thus to the rapid consolidation of factory labor that occurred in the late 19th century.
The raw material of the film is the daily, soul-sucking minutiae that comes with choosing and devoting oneself to the artist life in a country that cannot nor will not sustain such endeavors, rendering them ever more impractical without competitive grants, family money, or other such safety nets.
I like to think of the camera as something that helps me capture things I would not normally see. So when I see filmmakers watching their own images on the combo in real time, as they shoot, I cannot help but think of it as a tautology. Because they are assimilating the potentiality of the human eye.
In placing us so fully within the complexities of the COVID-era present, Coma reveals our very inability to unify it in thought.
Given a pair of warm bodies and a bed to work with, Denis is peerless at choreographing physical intimacy . . As long as things are more or less transactional, Trish and Daniel hold our attention, but the slow-burning love story is harder to swallow.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Every Halloween, Reverse Shot presents a week’s worth of perfect holiday recommendations. Here is a complete list of every film covered in our A Few Great Pumpkins essay series, 2006–2021.
A Couple could be uncharitably described as repetitive; Sophia returns again and again to the ways her husband wounded and slighted her, and even at a mere hour of runtime the film can feel as though it is retreading old ground. But the film is slipperier than these repetitions initially make it seem.
At once repugnant and entrancing, it turns the body into the ultimate frontier, an alien landscape teeming with surreal visions, less a decaying vessel than an undiscovered planet.
That tension that Caan carries merely by being on-screen might be best exemplified in The Gambler, the 1974 film directed by Karel Reisz from a James Toback script. It follows Caan as Axel Freed, a clever Harvard-educated literature professor and gambling addict from a well-to-do New York Jewish family.
The titles forming this recent trend have diegetic time loops, ones built into their narratives and acknowledged by the characters, with the temporally unmoored antics explained by malfunctioning time machines, meddling gods, or simple mental illness.
Formally, Pearl is his most elegant film, with careful, considered, yet modest compositions and smooth camera movements. West and regular DP Eliot Rockett use the whole wide frame, placing Pearl in the periphery of many shots with the farm consuming the rest, the countryside like a romantic painting spread over the background.
I wanted to show footage that felt brand new, that required a real watching and seeing and thinking and evaluating of what is in front of you. If you are gonna make a film about 1968, it better be something reevaluative.
Serge Daney once described Le Pont du Nord as the first French film of the eighties, suggesting that it marked the beginning of a new period in which the filmmakers that had burst onto the scene in the sixties returned to their roots.