Reviews
The neoliberal present demands a new mode of realism, adequate to those structures of control that are cloaked by economic and informational avenues utterly inaccessible to all but the highest echelons of technocratic power.
Is the act of sort-of-remaking, sort-of-updating the niche property Irma Vep an idiosyncratic riff on the IP regurgitation machine of today? Sure, but Assayas only ever seems half interested in Borgesian conceits. He is too earnest an artist.
It is a movie about making movies at the same time that it is a movie about how we consume them. It is a somber commentary on the ways black people try to grasp greased rungs on a ladder to temporary success while also an indictment of the ways people of color try to mold themselves into torturous shapes in order to fit in.
The film frames masculinity as endless, at times excruciating showmanship . . . The director articulates poignantly the heartbreak of familial love crudely bound up in the performance of power.
The new film from Claire Denis diagnoses the traps of modern romance, the aphorism-heavy sex and proclamations of complete devotion masking an essential incompatibility: it is possibly her least romantic film to date.
Fire of Love is a singular and sublime new documentary about a couple that risks the sentimental in order to realize the truly romantic.
Flux Gourmet favors a maximalist brand of satire, inflating mundane peccadilloes into epic proportions.
Even after his string of fictionalized autobiographical films, Davies featured surrogates whose experiences allow him to come to terms (philosophical, aesthetic, moral, sexual, always personal) with a world that has too often betrayed, disappointed, and made shame out of beauty.
Tonally uneven and a bit didactic in its dialogue, Crimes is nevertheless a film that both takes itself as a serious piece of art and lampoons the appetite for novel spectacle that subsumes so much of contemporary visual culture.
Vividly imagining a new future for the African diaspora, Neptune Frost is a sprawling Afro-centric science fiction that at once uplifts the oppressed and dresses down neocolonialism and binary thinking.
Miguel Gomes is a director who tends to enfold question, answer, and, especially, non-answer, into his actual films. His latest, The Tsugua Diaries, co-directed with his partner Maureen Fazendeiro, is arguably the most systematic working-out of this tendency.
So much of the screenplay is concerned with the flashy presence of big, topical themes like Trauma, Abuse, and Toxic Masculinity. Garland is intrigued by these themes as talking points, but he is incapable of incorporating them into the lived realities of his characters in ways that feel organically rooted in real-world concerns.
The sense of characterization emerges equally from the supposed downtime, the moments between the conversations.
The resplendence of the cave sequences must be seen to be believed, and their ingenuity marks Il Buco as a significant work of digital filmmaking.