Reviews
The new film by Alain Guiraudie takes place in a world where sexual desire is not just acknowledged as protean and unpredictable but also freely expressed and even accepted.
Casa Susanna is a critical elegy for a time long since passed. The true stories behind these photos offer crucial insight that for years was missing or left as a question mark whenever they were displayed in galleries.
Eleven features and nearly 30 years into his career, it is a given that the form and content of his films are irrevocably intertwined. His controlled aesthetic tends to echo his characters’ meticulous personalities, environments, and routines.
This is a film about two people contemplating the possibilities of what could have been and what still might be, but it is also about the electric charge and covert forces that draw two bodies and souls together.
Alexander Sokurov is renowned for his oblique directorial style, with mesmerizing, painterly effects, so it is surprising that he is proving to have had such influence on the new school of Russian realism.
They both want the relationship to continue, not simply for financial or sexual reasons, but, as it becomes clear, because of things far more significant, and far more connected to their inner selves than their outer circumstances.
Starring the luminous Trace Lysette as a trans woman returning home to aid her estranged, dying mother, Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson), the film dramatizes the conflicts and reconciliations that are spurned by the prospect of death, both literal and metaphorical.
Employing text, voice, and photography in literal, informational modes, What Are the Wild Waves Saying? shows how the most complex questions and quandaries often lie directly on the surface of history.
Unrest exists at the confluence two crucial historical currents. Its title refers to the part of a watch known as the unrueh or balance wheel, whose oscillations regulate the entire mechanism, and thus to the rapid consolidation of factory labor that occurred in the late 19th century.
The film has a knack for unexpected turns, avoiding the obvious in favor of sly emotional crescendos. The Eight Mountains takes care to do just enough dramatic sculpting to make sure its emotional inflection points resonate.
Mungiu maintains his penchant for slow-building narrative tension, gradually revealing dramatic stakes, yet rather than focus exclusively on one or two characters clearly wending their way through an economically dramatized moral dilemma, he takes a more panoramic approach.
This intimate, novelistic puzzle charts a region, a number of interconnected lives, and a series of past and present events like a hand-drawn map. The film meanders across genres, but, grounded by humor and naturalism, it all somehow feels a part of the same fertile landscape.
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.
In a not-too-distant future Japan, Plan 75 is a government program which offers people over the age of 75 a token monetary incentive to accept euthanasia, suggesting it is their civic duty to cease burdening the country.