Reviews
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.
Paying attention to minor characters constitutes not just an act of care for them but a whole difference in epistemology. This insight is core to Jill, Uncredited, a 17-minute short directed by Anthony Ing that splices together scenes of 78 films featuring background actor Jill Goldston from her half-century-long career.
Effective storytelling often centers ambiguities and the posing of questions rather than the incitement of direct action. Given this, narrative cinema has often struggled with climate change stories and how exactly to work against the passive dimensions of film viewing.
In Tommy Guns, director Carlos Conceição depicts the victims of Portuguese rule in Angola as literal zombies. His approach takes a page from postcolonial studies, in which spectral metaphors abound: the legacy of imperialism haunts people long after colonizers have departed, poisoning the culture even without a corporeal presence.
Wittmann asks us to listen to and look at water and notice the contingency inherent in its nature. We are witnesses to its evanescence, the way its exact shape or appearance exists for just 1/24th of a second, and for that long only because of the mechanical qualities of the film camera.
Does folklore come to us or react to what we give it? Mami Wata, C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third feature and the first by a Nigerian filmmaker to premiere at Sundance, is principally concerned with the meaning and scope of the stories we pass to each other.
The raw material of the film is the daily, soul-sucking minutiae that comes with choosing and devoting oneself to the artist life in a country that cannot nor will not sustain such endeavors, rendering them ever more impractical without competitive grants, family money, or other such safety nets.
The River Is Not a Border retraces the events of 1989 with an attentive but unobtrusive hand. Diago casts his participants not just as subjects but as storytellers, resulting in a film guided more by memory and feeling than historical fact or cinematic flair.
When Julia is alone and physically grounded on the Earth rather than speeding down the highway, Quivoron examines her queer performance. Rodeo is at its most mesmerizing when Julia’s hair isn’t whipping in the wind.
Enys Men feels as stubborn and solid as the stone monolith perched at the edge of its desolate setting; the cinematic equivalent of a modest yet immovable object, an impassive and ruggedly beautiful site of contemplation.