Aronofsky piles on incidents (rather than plot), bodies (rather than characters), until what once had the potential to be a pastoral paradise has become a writhing, grasping, cluttered Bosch-like abyss.
“We can look at Strong Island and see when your loved one dies in a vacuum, when the casual fragility of black life turns your childhood into a soap bubble—they are floating, and then they are gone. Tamir Rice was literally gone.”
"This film was able to see the light of day because we met Adèle Haenel. When we saw her there we talked a little but then we were separated. We thought, here is a young actress whose face could serve as a motor for our project, which we were having difficulty developing and writing."
Their contrivance is based on philosophical truths about human behavior, combined with faith in their audiences to distill truth from fiction. Their cinema presents an almost constant dialogue between the mundane and the colossal.
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 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.
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.
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.