Reviews
A terrible event occurs, which would send most families into spontaneous combustion, but in true Fukada fashion, everything quietly implodes, and everyone is left to grapple with things in messy, dirty ways that feel truer to how our hearts and brains function.
During the first days of the 2020 lockdown, when New Yorkers saw time opening out abyssally before them and for filmmakers any kind of large-scale production was impossible, Artemis Shaw found her old camcorder in her parents’ apartment.
Romvari and Xu are compassionate image-seekers, yet they also subtly interrogate the systems surrounding their subjects.
Amidst this beautiful and mysterious backdrop, sequences occur at random without explanation and do not always add up to a broader narrative. But much of its strength lies in the fact that very little happens and even less seems to connote meaning in the way we’re used to in cinema.
The documentary functions as a living archive, a collection of 20 films made between 1964 and 1982 reporting, commenting, and philosophizing on the Palestinian struggle.
In her loosely structured, sensorial documentary, Long maps this history out along the San Andreas Fault, which splinters the state from north to south, capturing the textures and colors of the mountainous valley on gorgeously grainy 16mm.
Nominally, A Common Sequence is a documentary, though, threading together meditations on colonialism, environmental degradation, capitalism, labor and immigration, machine learning and AI, DNA harvesting and genomic manipulation, the film adopts a nonlinear, almost impressionistic approach.
Herbaria offers audiences a unique meditation on extinction and preservation in the twinned worlds of plants and film. Shot on 35mm and 16mm, this mysterious, at times cryptic, essayistic work takes viewers to two locations: the seemingly disparate Buenos Aires Botanical Garden and the Museo del Cine.
What Alain Gomis has uncovered in these rushes is fascinating, proof of the confines of bourgeois culture an artist such as Thelonious Monk was forced to endure in his time.
A stunning feat of oral history, interweaving the lucid and at times jaw-dropping testimony of a multitude of eyewitnesses and participants with extensive and eye-opening newsreel footage from French, German, and British archives.
Tatum can market himself as a figurehead for a mainstream, sex-work-adjacent live show in part because he is now, primarily, a movie star in the public consciousness. The character of Mike, on the other hand, is a nobody in a foreign country.
Like many an adoption drama, Return to Seoul does trace a search for personal identity. But the film is unusual in the degree to which its transformations conform to those of its protagonist, matching her changeability with its own destabilizing structural reinventions.
The film has been constructed in a way that puts the dual onuses of perception and interpretation onto the audience. It is a heavy burden that is also hard to process when you’re being slammed around so forcefully.
Full Time is largely about the labor that continues in the shadows of a labor strike, and the non-union workers living outside Paris whose lives are overturned when the city shuts down. Julie is not a Norma Rae-esque heroine interested in organizing for the greater good; she is just trying to keep herself and her family afloat.