Michael Koresky
Nosferatu, The House of the Devil, My Dinner with Andre, The Thing, The X-Files: "Home," Empire of Passion, Rosemary’s Baby
We asked our writers to pick a contemporary filmmaker from a Latin American country who they’d like to champion; this could trigger a longer discussion about an oeuvre or an idea on a national cinema, or it could remain a close reading of a film itself.
Like all of his films, it’s a work of major excavation, only in some ways more literal: setting the groundwork for the film’s many narrative and philosophical threads is its portrait of the Atacama desert, its past and present, its sky and earth, its technological and historical resonances.
Not only does he acknowledge gay men’s longing and desire, he makes it explicit by eroticizing both their gaze and ours—statuesque, youthful, darker-skinned bodies moving alluringly through time and space.
A clunky, rattling toy chest of tired horror tropes, The Hole will nevertheless win over the Gremlins and Matinee mastermind’s devoted fans (I’m looking at you, Jonathan Rosenbaum!), and maybe a few brave tots in the bargain.
It’s clear right from the opening credits—the film’s most purely invigorating sequence— that Enter the Void will pummel rather than make one ponder.
At this point, it’s safe to say François Ozon is clearly neither the rabble-rousing enfant terrible he first seemed nor the stealth subversive mainstream filmmaker he might have evolved into.
International culture-clash movie narratives used to be about bridging gaps, language barriers, righting wrongs, learning, healing. How times have changed.
German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s penchant for over-peppering his plots with contrivance and forced convolution would seem to have found the perfect fit in the high-decibel comic confection Soul Kitchen.
If one shot can contain an entire film in essence, then can a sound?
Escapist in the truest and least perturbing sense of the word, this conceptually gentle but artistically bold fiction-documentary hybrid takes viewers to a lush, vivid natural world—the second largest coral reef on the planet, the Banco Chinchorro to be exact, located in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
The British filmmaker begins the narrative proper of his 1992 masterpiece The Long Day Closes with the blazing brass pomp of Twentieth Century Fox’s iconic fanfare, written by Alfred Newman.
Hansen-Løve, as it turns out, is not interested in charting the everyday frustrations of a man unable to mix his worlds; rather The Father of My Children becomes a portrait of crippling contemporary anxiety, both professional and familial, and the possibility that they may never be fully reconciled.
While not without its stilted moments and easy sentiments, Mother and Child is lucid, engaging, and novelistic in the best sense—even if it could have used that little extra aesthetic push that made Nine Lives so remarkable.
That she rarely lets any of her characters—whether ostensibly heroes or antagonists—off the hook indicates a cynicism that’s at least grounded and far-sighted, but it also often makes her films feel agenda-driven, narrow, and guarded.
Straightforwardly titled yet bent to the max, Pornography is a shape-shifting, genre-twisting plunge into a nefarious sexual underworld that so envisions itself as a David Lynch film it might just qualify as having an identity crisis.
As with so many films that bear the “Merchant Ivory Presents” imprimatur, The City of Your Final Destination is preoccupied with legacy—inheritance, knowledge, generational conflict, the betraying or keeping of familial secrets.
The title of the new Argentinean film The Secret in Their Eyes sounds like a crummy Anglicization of a foreign import. Alas, no, it’s a direct translation, and, ultimately, all too fitting for the moth-eaten movie at hand.
Breillat mounts Bluebeard efficiently and cheaply, shooting on video and casting many local, nonprofessional actors; the result recalls the intentional period artificiality of such films as Eric Rohmer’s Perceval or Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du lac.
It’s a fleet, revealing look at the studio as singular corporate entity, and thus a schizophrenic attempt to honor its toiling craftsmen while also giving due prominence to the executive infighting that made the studio in that era a target for media gossip as much as a candidate for accolades.