Features
Does folklore come to us or react to what we give it? Mami Wata, C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third feature and the first by a Nigerian filmmaker to premiere at Sundance, is principally concerned with the meaning and scope of the stories we pass to each other.
The River Is Not a Border retraces the events of 1989 with an attentive but unobtrusive hand. Diago casts his participants not just as subjects but as storytellers, resulting in a film guided more by memory and feeling than historical fact or cinematic flair.
When Julia is alone and physically grounded on the Earth rather than speeding down the highway, Quivoron examines her queer performance. Rodeo is at its most mesmerizing when Julia’s hair isn’t whipping in the wind.
Jeanne Dielman asserts the importance of its subject while also asking us to reconsider what we look for in—and how we look at—a movie. We inhabit what feels like a simulation of real time, confined except for the occasional errand, to the interior of 23 quai du Commerce.
The focus on the packaging and commodification of these plants and vegetables demystifies the agrestal fantasy of so many of our products. At first numbing, Ortín’s images of rote mechanical production begin accruing a subtlesense of dread, appearing as an unbroken and uncaring process.
Melnyk had set out to make a strictly observational documentary. On the ground in Stuzhytsia, he found it impossible to maintain the distance this approach required.
Our Body, one of the best documentaries I have seen in years, silenced the murmur of any externalities the moment it started, maintaining its quietly firm grip on one’s attention through every startling moment of its nearly three-hour running time.
Art Talent Show illustrates how hyper-individualism dominates artistic philosophy in the younger generation; many prospective students talk about wanting to communicate their essence or their worldview with their work.
A terrible event occurs, which would send most families into spontaneous combustion, but in true Fukada fashion, everything quietly implodes, and everyone is left to grapple with things in messy, dirty ways that feel truer to how our hearts and brains function.
Beavers is a uniquely formal lyricist, and his films typically consist of the rhythmic analysis of a narrow band of content, spiraling out from a core of significant people or objects to examine their immediate environment.
During the first days of the 2020 lockdown, when New Yorkers saw time opening out abyssally before them and for filmmakers any kind of large-scale production was impossible, Artemis Shaw found her old camcorder in her parents’ apartment.
Romvari and Xu are compassionate image-seekers, yet they also subtly interrogate the systems surrounding their subjects.
The documentary functions as a living archive, a collection of 20 films made between 1964 and 1982 reporting, commenting, and philosophizing on the Palestinian struggle.
Amidst this beautiful and mysterious backdrop, sequences occur at random without explanation and do not always add up to a broader narrative. But much of its strength lies in the fact that very little happens and even less seems to connote meaning in the way we’re used to in cinema.