What is happening, or what has happened, in the obviously haunted space of Kelly-Anne’s mind and body is not something we are privy to, except via subtle context clues.
His films are often extraordinarily sensitive contraptions motored by desire. Watching and rewatching the work of James Ivory in 2024 reveals that a certain frankness around love and life was always a part of that operation, even as obviousness was avoided at all costs.
My First Film is surprisingly optimistic in the face of the cringeworthy and toxic behavior that the fictional director and her crew contend with on set. In spite of all the failure and frustration, it is a film with a deep affection for the craft of filmmaking and the fools who have dedicated their lives to it.
The setting is a small village on the north coast of Iran. At its edge is a strip of shoreline nearly always crowned by a diadem of dense haze. The film, which is almost unforgiving in its succession of gorgeously photographed imagery, is about what reaches through this liminal boundary from the outside world.
Close Your Eyes is primarily a movie about growing old and the power of memory, with cinema as its central metaphor. The underlying tension throughout all of Erice’s work is that which lies between the still and the moving image, between the desire to freeze time and the inevitability of its passage.
The film demonstrates the way a certain strain of reactionary masculinity oppresses both the relatively privileged Thomas and the Malagasy characters, though a third act point-of-view shift ensures that this analysis does not equivocate the suffering of occupier and occupied.
People get into the habit of saying things like, this was a bad year for film, or this was a good year for film. Stupid stuff—stuff that's supposed to be based on concepts like supply and demand. But you can’t have meaningful supply and demand when nobody really knows what the demands are.
Would someone moved by the familial bonds honored onscreen also be encouraged to reconsider the larger carceral system? Or would they simply judge the fathers for making “bad decisions” that keep them from their children?
Just as Hitchcock noted that the best suspense comes from letting the audience in on the secret, Shyamalan forces the viewer to wait, wonder, and witness as Trap’s villain protagonist navigates his escape from the trap that has been set for him.
Understandably the film’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, are not interested in the inherently comic potential of their material, even if they cite Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as an influence. After all, people, this is no laughing matter.
The debut feature of writer-director India Donaldson pivots on a young woman’s realization that it is sometimes wisest to keep those we love at an arm’s length.
The narrative framing echoes that of Lake Mungo and other mockumentaries, the events having already taken place, the yarn unspooled by an unseen director and editor, with the found footage elements appearing less as real-time documentation than forensic evidence.
Like all cultural practices, film acting is a historical palimpsest: new affects, tones, and gestures jostle with older ones, and what makes something feel contemporary is often a matter of some contingency.
No longer confined to their home countries, its characters practically teleport between locations, their paths crisscrossing in ways that quickly become impossible to track. Across the runtime, individuals relate dreams, hallucinations, and memories of things that we’ve already seen or will see.