Reviews
Her physical acting might be less obvious than what Poor Things demanded, but if we were to draw a parallel between Michelle Fuller and her Oscar-winning rendition of Bella Baxter, the former is a highly evolved version of the latter judging by how her character assimilates learned behavior.
Sound of Falling anchors the undulations of history in a physical structure, a home inhabited by generations of people. That allows Schilinski to enter the past through oblique, almost surreptitious, methods, which casts history as a moving amalgamation of life’s minor and mirroring moments instead of dramatic apexes.
To invoke another luminary of the New Wave, it is a mid-budget marriage of truth and spectacle of which Truffaut would have approved, the sort of which today has become the most endangered species of filmmaking. In short, it is a film made by the Slacker director who also gave us Dazed and Confused.
The film often feels like a one-act play. It is foremost an experiment, in the same sense as Linda Rosenkrantz’s original mission to document the daily to-dos of her friends.
The material is, of course, ripe for the picking, with Dracula/Nosferatu dramatizations spun regularly, each one more lifeless than the last. The logic of genAI, too, is by its own admission vampiric, receiving its life force by scraping the flesh of the internet.
Documenting the high-stakes Chocobar trial and unraveling the state’s deceptions requires a certain amount of linear and coherent storytelling, which Martel has traditionally resisted in her films.
Justly acclaimed for her nonpareil handling of dynamic, kinetic action, Bigelow has now stepped up from crime and mayhem in the streets and war in foreign lands to enter the ultimate arena of high-stakes conflict.
If the cinema of Jafar Panahi has evolved over the past 30 years, partly because of changing circumstances, one can also draw a through line. These movies have much in common—starting with the fact that they are uniformly excellent, challenging, and engaged.
With its breathless, alert script, Blue Moon manages to keep expanding and contracting from its central dramatic concern, using the breakdown of Rodgers and Hart's creative partnership to tease out age-old paradoxes between art and commerce, hope and despair, commitment and compromise.
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.
Outside the context of the film, the piano score might sound like the accompaniment for a toasty night by the fireside. Yet Hunt’s minor chords and capricious melodies allow the film a gracious domesticity that works in contrast to its swollen, poignant portrait of disintegration.
It is by now a cliche to allege that the films of Luca Guadagnino offer more in the way of surface luxuries than intellectual stimulation, but the chasm is especially apparent in a film that at one point finds Roberts stiffly lecturing on the panopticon.
Eschewing the use of talking heads or a slate of statistics, director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the narrative largely from police bodycam footage—arguably the true crime idiom of the 2020s, taking the premise of Cops (1989–present) to its optimized conclusion: law enforcement is the camera crew.
Like late Ozu, with his parade of seasonally titled shomin-geki exploring the practically endless permutations of family life, Father Mother Sister Brother is a series of intergenerational vignettes.