Reviews
For migrants and refugees, the earth becomes a cruel obstacle course in which they gamble with their lives. The Dupes (Al-Makhdu’un, 1972), directed by Tewfik Saleh, tells a searingly specific tale of displaced Palestinians trying to cross the desert to Kuwait.
La Práctica is a return to for Martin Rejtman to the seriocomic stylings of his early work that finds the director navigating a very different economic landscape, one shaped by the neoliberal reforms of the ’90s but transformed by the ongoing recession and the attendant rise in freelance labor.
Mostly using shots in which witnesses sharing their testimonies turn their backs turned to the camera, de la Orden emphasizes their spoken memory while avoiding a visual exhibition of atrocities.
Melancholy co-exists with tenderness and tranquility; the isolation felt by the characters slowly eases as their connections to the world around them become more apparent.
Using pirated media, found/remixed footage, and some clever edits, the two-person Australian art collective known as Soda Jerk has constructed a film, Hello Dankness, that attempts to illustrate the five-year span from 2016 to 2021 across several acts.
Anaita Wali Zada, a first-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021 with her sister after working for several years as a TV presenter and journalist, is often the lone subject of these images. Her composed, stoic face entrances just as it conceals a dull ache for something Donya struggles to name.
The films of Ira Sachs have balanced their slender narratives with richly resided-in evocations of people and milieus, surveying the uneasy and often breakable bonds between lovers, companions, and kin. But Passages is the first of his dramas whose leanness feels effectively and exhilaratingly taut.
The depictions of trans people and in particular sex workers can be centered around the desires of cis straight men; in contrast, Kokomo City, in which the participants can simply be, feels like an act of resistance.
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.
The film feels emotionally authentic, and while its narrative runs the risk of being a litany of heartbreaking moments, its unparalleled specificity and peerless performances, particularly the two non-actor leads, preserve its integrity.
Oppenheimer, with its achronological historical narrative, crosscuts among different time frames, and though it has just one inevitable outcome (the annihilation of humanity), its biopic structure gives it an inherent tidiness it is constantly working against.
The Barbie doll itself implicitly communicates the paradox of womanhood. Think of the mothers who bought their daughters dolls that promised adulthood would be effortless and beautiful, when they knew that womanhood often meant disappointment, loneliness, and above all, effort.
The film is a stark departure from the mythical terrain of Undine or the hauntological anachronism of Transit. History is here only vaguely alluded to.
Dial has five credited writers and cost 300 million, yet the film plays it safe, which is the worst thing a big budget film can do. It is, as is usually the case these days, an impersonal, idling piece of intellectual property.