Nocturama is up to many things, perhaps including taking the piss, and it is not always easy to disentangle its aims.
Their vision of a polarized and polarizing New York seems to have crystallized in a rather extraordinary way: to the Safdies, the city is at once a purgatory and a wonderland, a crucible that forges both deep grievance and limitless compassion.
Bigelow is a filmmaker of no small power and intuition, although the movie at times seems curiously hesitant, hedging its bets with little bits of insurance against blowback or the possibility of being misunderstood.
The burdens and blessings of our patrimony, both cultural and personal, are an overriding concern in the debut feature by Kogonada. Columbus lingers on the juxtaposition between the architectural masterpieces that bedeck the region and the pedestrian lives of its residents.
Until now, his stubborn auteurism has foisted upon audiences a surfeit of heavy psychodrama, cinematic doggerel, and narrative stodge where the excitement (which he has always shown himself capable of engineering) should have been.
The Girl Without Hands is based on the Grimm fairy tale of the same name about a young girl escaping from the devil after her father sells her for gold. Animated entirely by Laudenbach himself, the film seems to be in motion even on the rare occasion where it is standing completely still.
The film proceeds in an unhurried fashion, from one static shot to the next, with edits more often than not bringing about changes in time and space, rather than additional vantage points on events. Solnicki resists the urge to coalesce his vignettes into a more structured narrative experience.
While the selection includes both fiction and nonfiction films, the slant toward documentaries is pronounced: this year, out of the 15 films presented in the international competition, the vast majority were documentaries or fiction/nonfiction hybrids.
Self-consciously spare and reaching for a grandeur possibly too far beyond its frame, A Ghost Story is nevertheless a film of mesmerizing visual ideas and conceptual integrity.
The broad-brush progressivism in Okja will be familiar to viewers who have seen other movies by Bong Joon-ho. Climate change, pollution, genetically modified foods, imperialism, militarism, and corporate greed are among the issues he has tackled.
The 1971 version is a slippery object, an art film made by a genre specialist, while the 2017 film feels like the work of an art house director approaching a genre piece; though in assigning these labels, it is worth investigating what they mean.
We hear story after story in which subjects betray more than they would like about their class, race, personal successes, failures, and family before the patient, gentle cameras.
Amirpour seems to have placed herself in a cozily indulgent trance, mesmerized by the possibilities of deluxe, corporately subsidized cult filmmaking.
The Big Sick was directed by Michael Showalter, whose anarchic sensibility (as best represented in his absurdist sketch comedy troupes The State and Stella) is completely absent from the film.
Tavernier approaches his subject not only as a film lover but also as a film director who knows his way around a set, a man with an inexhaustible appetite for dish about behind-the-scenes goings on and an insatiable curiosity for what makes movies tick.