The films of Sean Baker, collectively approaching something like a sexploitation genre unto itself, seem to be trying to split the difference between Hollywood and raw grassroots guerilla cinema, landing on a kind of pop realism that feels aesthetically uniquely his, if hollow at the core.
In the wake of the Small Axe cycle, McQueen now sets out to submit British cultural identity to a stress test during a period of maximum crisis.
For better or worse, Aaron Sorkin has made his dramatic metier out of the kind of organized backstage chaos portrayed in Saturday Night; it cannot be understated how strange it is to watch someone poorly imitate his style, draining it of any rhetorical rhythm while retaining the self-importance.
Under the cover of blackout curtains, a woman jolts herself awake with a hair-raising shout. She catches her breath, but cannot shake off her ring of panic, the quiver and cold sweat of constant fear. This will be one of the more peaceful moments of her day.
Caught by the Tides represents a different kind of film that can emerge from unorthodox methods and stands as a testament to the medium’s long-term possibilities.
Rather than see the film as a tentative foray into fiction, it may be more useful to consider The Damned as a film that explores how one might have gone about making a documentary during the Civil War.
Set in the humid depths of the Amazon basin, Transamazonia byPia Marais exudes a rhythmic, meditative quality in tension with its disquieting mise en scène and cogent postcolonial critique.
For a tale of doomed love and excruciating loneliness, the sixth feature from Miguel Gomes is not powered by sorrow so much as an inordinate fondness for the world, a film where director and characters alike seem determined to find beauty in the most unexpected places.
Cohen suggests that modern cinema, unshackled from genre, is more powerful than we may give it credit for. His work is porous, holding room for all these possibilities and more.
The making of the play provides the dramatic scaffolding for the unfolding of life, but both the skit and the college life that surrounds it are presented as spontaneous, oblique, and devastating in their elisions.
Kapadia again expertly maneuvers themes of romance, ambition, and injustice in her second feature, a languid, affectionate triptych of three working women in Mumbai coming to terms with their varying displacements.
In collaboration with Huppert, who has seldom appeared so playful and unguarded, he depicts Iris as supremely attentive and sympathetic to her students, while challenging them to dig deeper and shine a light on the thornier parts of themselves that they tend to keep buried.
Mohammad Rasoulof is part of a rich legacy of courageous Iranian filmmakers who have bravely challenged the authority and inevitability of the Islamic Republic, through resistance films that have often left them exiled from the homeland and people their art is fighting for.
It is a work of Robert Coover–like fabulation and Beckettian existential absurdity that highlights baseball’s incongruities and contradictions. There has not been a fictional sports movie quite like Eephus, which deliberately unravels itself at the seams.
Between the writtenness of the text and the flat planes of the modernist upstate house Martha has chosen as the location to end her life, the film’s melodrama tips into abstraction.