This is a film about two people contemplating the possibilities of what could have been and what still might be, but it is also about the electric charge and covert forces that draw two bodies and souls together.
Museum of the Moving Image film curators Eric Hynes and Edo Choi continue their chat about Cannes 2023, including comments on Killers of the Flower Moon, May December, Anatomy of a Fall, The Pot au Feu, and more.
Alexander Sokurov is renowned for his oblique directorial style, with mesmerizing, painterly effects, so it is surprising that he is proving to have had such influence on the new school of Russian realism.
For the second year in a row, MoMI’s film curators visited the Cannes Film Festival together. Hynes and Choi pass notes in the hall between screenings, discussing the culture of and around the festival, and, yes, the occasional film.
They both want the relationship to continue, not simply for financial or sexual reasons, but, as it becomes clear, because of things far more significant, and far more connected to their inner selves than their outer circumstances.
Starring the luminous Trace Lysette as a trans woman returning home to aid her estranged, dying mother, Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson), the film dramatizes the conflicts and reconciliations that are spurned by the prospect of death, both literal and metaphorical.
Employing text, voice, and photography in literal, informational modes, What Are the Wild Waves Saying? shows how the most complex questions and quandaries often lie directly on the surface of history.
Unrest exists at the confluence two crucial historical currents. Its title refers to the part of a watch known as the unrueh or balance wheel, whose oscillations regulate the entire mechanism, and thus to the rapid consolidation of factory labor that occurred in the late 19th century.
Using pirated media, found/remixed footage, and some clever edits, the two-person Australian art collective known as Soda Jerk has constructed a film, Hello Dankness, that attempts to illustrate the five-year span from 2016 to 2021 across several acts.
The film has a knack for unexpected turns, avoiding the obvious in favor of sly emotional crescendos. The Eight Mountains takes care to do just enough dramatic sculpting to make sure its emotional inflection points resonate.
Her dense sound mix and editing patterns prioritize the exploration of space over the conveyance of narrative information. That interpretive freedom takes root even amid a cornucopia of symbolically charged motifs.
Mungiu maintains his penchant for slow-building narrative tension, gradually revealing dramatic stakes, yet rather than focus exclusively on one or two characters clearly wending their way through an economically dramatized moral dilemma, he takes a more panoramic approach.
This intimate, novelistic puzzle charts a region, a number of interconnected lives, and a series of past and present events like a hand-drawn map. The film meanders across genres, but, grounded by humor and naturalism, it all somehow feels a part of the same fertile landscape.
Zlotowski exploits the staples of the rom-com genre only to temper them. In the third act, she leaves us as jarred and devastated as Rachel herself, betrayed not only by Ali but by the narratives that women are groomed to believe.
In a not-too-distant future Japan, Plan 75 is a government program which offers people over the age of 75 a token monetary incentive to accept euthanasia, suggesting it is their civic duty to cease burdening the country.