Reviews
Like late Ozu, with his parade of seasonally titled shomin-geki exploring the practically endless permutations of family life, Father Mother Sister Brother is a series of intergenerational vignettes.
Magellan is one of the few films to cover this episode of the Age of Discovery, and Lav Diaz uses this stab at a grand seafaring spectacular to reject the idea that white colonialists “discovered” anything at all.
Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to its questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water.
A grotesque and grimly funny freak-out that unfolds with the hurtling momentum of a runaway train, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You marks the reemergence of its long dormant writer-director.
Between its compositional dynamism and picaresque sensibility, the film is an auteur work to the core; it is also enervating in ways that do not so much undermine the stylistic pyrotechnics as indicate they’re the source of the problem.
The very existence of this brash film, which reveals the hearts of darkness at the center of Cuba’s cultural institutions, is proof that creative expression may be hindered, or sometimes stalled, but it can never be stopped.
SVT trends towards paternal humanitarian coverage of Palestine during the First and Second Intifada. Unseen throughout, however, is how television was shaped by sociohistorical eras.
Alboury will not come inside, and he will not go home, either; the more the two men try to feel each other out, the less likely it becomes that one or the other is going to budge. This is a compelling setup, sociologically and emotionally loaded.
For all our anxieties around the obsolescence of the medium, Bi Gan is moved by an unwavering belief in its subversive powers. Resurrection is not a valentine so much as a manifesto, a rousing wake-up call to all that cinema can still do.
Khalil Joseph asks the viewer to connect the dots between these places, figures, and events, both fiction and nonfiction, the point is not to figure it all out. BLKNWS is a movie to get lost in, like a hypnotic chopped-and-screwed tape.
Hamlet is invoked as a familiar revenge-plot classic, but that premise is mere window dressing. The characters from the play bear little resemblance to how they are written in it here, and are mostly marginal anyway, leaving the movie more like fanfiction than a seriously considered retelling.
Jenkin shot Rose himself on a 16mm Bolex with no live sound, opting to mix, record, and compose all of the film’s aural elements in postproduction. The uncanny effects of this approach lend his tactile imagery a subtle layer of distortion, the story seemingly echoed from a distant point in time.
What Does That Nature Say to You is notable not because it eschews dramatic material but because it withholds the usual means of discerning which details are relevant or irrelevant to the nominal drama.
Below the Clouds, though set in a relatively small area hunkered uneasily between the Phlegraean Fields to the West and towering Vesuvius to the East, is populated with incidents that invite the viewer to contemplate a broader, global apocalyptic moment.