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.
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.
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.
The more personal A Want in Her gets, the less it feels like a document constructed with a prospective viewer in mind, and so the result is edifying and intrusive in equal measure.
The film is an object that unfurls a bit like a complex piece of classical music. Zhao introduces forms and motifs in order to stretch them to the limits of intelligibility. Before you’re even aware of it, Periphery has already moved on to some other idea.
A vague pre-apocalyptic tension courses through the docu-style footage of Monaco at night, where sparkling lights only serve to highlight the desolation, as well as the cavernous yet claustrophobic domestic interiors, which feel like they are on the verge of swallowing inhabitants whole.
All we see, throughout the 72 minutes of A Frown Gone Mad, are bloody faces and the back of Bouba’s arm administering the shots. But the specter of war and death in the Lebanese capital hovers like a shroud.
The film asks its audience to question the very nature of narratives, of artifice, of truth, fiction, and the mechanisms artists use to achieve their ends.
Despite its anxious and melancholic air, When the Phone Rang also captures the golden haze of youth, with its moments of whimsy and wonder . . . not even a raging war can compare, at times, to the monumental mortification of pubescence.
His films occlude the presence of human labor and consumption. Instead, he spotlights the empty, spaceship-like labs and warehouses where meat of all kinds is processed or artificially created before it is packaged by automated robots and sent off to supermarkets.