Reviews
These evidential images provide a midpoint between knowledge and history, and between a subjective and objective truth. This is the framework for Loznitsa’s archival cinema: a kind of foundation on which we can build a better understanding of the world.
With Ahed’s Knee, writer-director Nadav Lapid returns—with a vengeance—to his native Israel after his 2019 detour to Paris with Synonyms, and with its predecessor, Ahed’s Knee shares traces of autobiography.
Muntean depicts well-meaning urban folk who aim to help the country’s rural areas but end up needing rescuing themselves. Muntean’s story is then a social parable disguised as an adventure movie, with undertones of folkish horror.
Over the course of four hours, Loznitsa constructs a granular record of Lithuania’s moves towards independence.
The film, starring Adele Exarchopoulos as a hard-living, pain-numbing flight attendant on a fictional low-cost carrier, is a welcome indictment of the leisure culture and spiritual malaise of the Common Market.
When I’m on the set, I’m learning about what I’m constantly drawn to. Part of it is instinct, and part of it is your own obsession, what you’re drawn to. Once I started making films, without losing that theoretical approach completely, that’s when you start gravitating towards things that move you or that attune you.
Great Freedom confirms Rogowski as a protean and exceptionally physical performer, a screen star who appears to emit his own force field.
The film is a richly layered look at the conflicting longings and impulses of early adulthood, the cinematic equivalent to a bittersweet love song that also happens to be catchy as hell.
His penchant for fantastic narratives has caused many to liken Hosoda to Miyazaki, but work hews closer to the heightened melodrama of his contemporaries in anime like Makoto Shinkai and Naoko Yamada. His tenderness and perpetual optimism are key to why Belle and his other films are as beautifully drawn as they are.
Licorice Pizza conveys summertime dreaminess with very little of the lassitude that usually comes with it. Sun-drenched teen suburbia never moved so fast; everyone is always running toward or away from something, whether cops, coke-crusted movie producers, restaurants, or pinball palaces.
Resurrections is born from a different era; its text is concerned with the matters of trans people who have lived openly as themselves long enough to have actualized those desires and develop new fears.
As with Uncle Boonmee and Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong often materializes traumas in the form of phantoms that hover in the margins of his protagonists’ imaginations, visiting and sometimes haunting them in the same way the present is always shaped by the ghosts of the pasts.
Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is full of lovely, obvious, expressionistic style choices, which not only registered on my limited Shakespeare palate but felt invigorating after 18 months of watching mediocrely lensed historical dramas on my TV.
Gyllenhaal is more muted on the suggestions of queerness in the book, leaving them burrowed in undertones and bringing her preoccupations with motherhood and womanhood to the fore.