Reviews
A Couple could be uncharitably described as repetitive; Sophia returns again and again to the ways her husband wounded and slighted her, and even at a mere hour of runtime the film can feel as though it is retreading old ground. But the film is slipperier than these repetitions initially make it seem.
This is a delicately painful and painfully honest film, a portrait of innocence shading into experience set among the shadows of an American past that could scarcely feel more present.
A believable erotic tension builds in both silence and conversation. The film evinces a fascination with how people watch and learn from each other, its protagonists trying on different styles of performance.
What Deadwyler perhaps achieves most impressively in her portrayal, which she has said is drawn primarily from Mamie’s memoir, but also archival footage and photographs, is to conjure a feeling beyond the image, of Mamie’s suffering and maternal strength, without turning her into a folk hero.
With this film, Hong and company reflect on how, in middle age, they have willingly submitted themselves more to the potential of randomness in their art.
Aftersun, the feature debut of the Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells, comes as close as any film I can recall to giving grief a cinematic form that does not seek to explicate but instead embody its very instability.
The writer-director details the obvious: our systems are inherently self-defeating and defined by exploitation, no matter who’s at the top of the food chain.
By the time our maestro is duly disgraced, some may be moved to righteous applause while others are moved to pity. Many might not know how to feel. But the ambivalence feels purposeful.
All That Breathes is a revelation not because it presents a straightforward clash between man and nature but because it understands that man is also nature.
Given a pair of warm bodies and a bed to work with, Denis is peerless at choreographing physical intimacy . . As long as things are more or less transactional, Trish and Daniel hold our attention, but the slow-burning love story is harder to swallow.
Formally, Pearl is his most elegant film, with careful, considered, yet modest compositions and smooth camera movements. West and regular DP Eliot Rockett use the whole wide frame, placing Pearl in the periphery of many shots with the farm consuming the rest, the countryside like a romantic painting spread over the background.
Hold Me Tight, directed by Mathieu Amalric and starring Vicky Krieps, is a wildly original exploration of maternal ambivalence, joy, and mourning.
Where the A. S. Byatt novel is more interested in how it presents historical details and toying with the stories that served as inspiration, insightfully analyzing and discussing everything from Chaucer to One Thousand and One Nights, Miller and co-writer Gore lean into the magic of fantasy.
For those of you who can’t get enough of his 1995 film Heat, widely and reasonably regarded as his masterpiece, well, now there’s Heat 2, a gritty, vivid, 468-page second helping that delivers the goods and also goes to surprising new places.