Reviews
The Delinquents is not a high-octane crime thriller about fleeing the law, but a whimsical, delicate tale of self-fulfillment and liberation in a capitalist society, and a narrative that defies logic and realism for the sake of its own freedom.
This hybrid courtroom drama-slash-psychological thriller is so conducive for both chin-stroking critical contemplation and a certain (highly rarefied) form of crowd-pleasing that it could just as easily have been engineered in a lab as crafted as a work of art.
Both microscopic and galactic-sized things appear roughly the same size within the film’s fixed 4:3 frame; it is up to you to decide what you are seeing.
Household Saints is about the families lovers come from and the futures they build for themselves. It was a girl-meets-boy story with a “happily ever after” complicated by the wheels of fate.
Older actors could have made these characters and their bond more emotionally resonant and credibly worn, marked by a sense of shared history and precious, always dwindling time.
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.