Features
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Windless is rigorously pictorial with centrally composed shots and the linear perspective of Renaissance art, where the relative size, shape, and position of objects is organized around imagined lines converging at a point on the horizon. But even though the film upholds those conventions, it also makes room for the character to resist or break them.