Eileen G'Sell
His obliviousness to anything beyond his chain link fence gestures to the political and cultural schism dividing much of America—between draft dodgers and patriots, rioters and the police, those fine with the status quo and those earnestly believing that things can change for the better.
In Emergent City, a documentary by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg about the Brooklyn Sunset Park district, community comprises more than a group of people who live within designated boundaries; it is a living, breathing body.
Carrying on with the tradition of mingling eros with the abject, The Shrouds reimagines how we might visually regard our faithful departed.
This is not a movie that marvels at the throes of human despair, or at the preternatural resilience of one particular woman. It is instead a movie in which a mother chooses to carry on in fervid defiance, paving a way for her five children to do the same.
Set in the humid depths of the Amazon basin, Transamazonia byPia Marais exudes a rhythmic, meditative quality in tension with its disquieting mise en scène and cogent postcolonial critique.
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?
Eschewing traditional methods of exposition like dialogue and voiceover, Hvistendahl reveals character relationships and plot primarily through meticulous attention to audio and visual details.
My Old Ass, Good One, How to Have Sex, Essex Girls, Suncoast
This is a film that defies tidy moral categorization, the type of film that warrants revisitation and contemplation years later—not only to assess its potential oversights but also the ways in which our grasp of representation, and its inherent complexities, must keep on evolving.
Poor Things is strangely, even shockingly, hopeful, despite being the most overtly political film yet from Lanthimos. It is also arguably his first feminist film, though I suspect many will argue about its efficacy as such.
This 168-minute opus from documentarian Claire Simon exposes the mystery and marvels of what it physiologically and emotionally means to be human in a body that inevitably blooms and wilts.
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.
Lynn is a female character that we rarely see: however beautiful, she is uncharismatic, taciturn, and professionally unambitious. In Stonewalling, her decision to sell her eggs on the black market (for the equivalent of 2800 U.S. dollars) leads to the discovery that she is one-month pregnant.
By the time our maestro is duly disgraced, some may be moved to righteous applause while others are moved to pity. Many might not know how to feel. But the ambivalence feels purposeful.
I wanted to show footage that felt brand new, that required a real watching and seeing and thinking and evaluating of what is in front of you. If you are gonna make a film about 1968, it better be something reevaluative.
Hold Me Tight, directed by Mathieu Amalric and starring Vicky Krieps, is a wildly original exploration of maternal ambivalence, joy, and mourning.
Tonally uneven and a bit didactic in its dialogue, Crimes is nevertheless a film that both takes itself as a serious piece of art and lampoons the appetite for novel spectacle that subsumes so much of contemporary visual culture.
There is a quality to the gaze that is always political. It is not that children have a more poetic look on life, but that it is vital for them to look, it is vital for them to gaze. It is about getting information, because they are dependent and a lot is not said within families that have a strong hierarchy.