Blue Sun Palace represents a new aesthetic vernacular for stories of the New York City working class, betraying international inspiration more than Sundance-school neorealism.
In Emergent City, a documentary by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg about the Brooklyn Sunset Park district, community comprises more than a group of people who live within designated boundaries; it is a living, breathing body.
If the vampire lore in Sinners does not quite cohere, a more compelling pattern unfolds. Coogler seems to recycle a premise he first staged in Black Panther: that no one who embraces the American project may escape its grotesque transformations.
Carrying on with the tradition of mingling eros with the abject, The Shrouds reimagines how we might visually regard our faithful departed.
The fugitive joys of the characters in Killer of Sheep emanate, as they so often do, from the collision of art and the body. A dancing woman clings to her lover’s chest, and a boy leaps between building tops. A voice within me cries: ascendence remains not only plausible, but essential.
Touching the Screen
This year, each writer wrote about a single game that defined their year in play. We’ve named six GOTYs in total. Between those write-ups you’ll find a few odds and sods reminiscent of the annual RS Two Cents throwdowns.
Tensions between an old and new guard of writers feature in Opus, which twists the Almost Famous concept of a writer going on the road with enigmatic musicians into a horror-comedy embittered about the state of relations between artists and critics.
The result is less a collective narrative of the ongoing war than a collage of impressions and feelings that guide the viewer across geographical terrain and reveal a country’s citizens processing their trauma in wildly different ways.
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.
I had the image of these two coal miners in the dark kissing. I think this is because I am always interested in the spirituality of Earth, of the depth of Earth. There is something very spiritual in that. And this film is about home and leaving home.
The intention here was to make an erotic film without relying on or showing sexual acts. That was something I told myself from the very beginning: no one will make love this time.
Each of the eleven filmmakers activates celluloid’s formal potentials while also negotiating the tensions among technologies that irrevocably alter our world—and ways of seeing.
The aesthetic looseness feels like an appropriate evocation of the anything-goes sensibility of childhood, as well as the pedagogical nature of the educational milieu.
Diciannove, the first film by Giovanni Tortorici, who is not yet out his twenties, speaks to the psychic undercurrents of our fresh Hell, while also carrying on a dialogue with the traditions of European romanticism in literature and film.
Though Measures of a Funeral is a lushly photographed, globe-trotting saga that runs nearly two and a half hours, its bones are that of an essay film.