Reviews
Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order, but even though a character or prop might reappear across sections, and images occasionally rhyme, the chapters are distinct.
This hybrid courtroom drama-slash-psychological thriller is so conducive for both chin-stroking critical contemplation and a certain (highly rarefied) form of crowd-pleasing that it could just as easily have been engineered in a lab as crafted as a work of art.
Last Summer is not so much a provocation or the immersion in perversion that those who know only of the logline and Breillat’s career might be led to believe. This is a master class in emotional precision.
Both microscopic and galactic-sized things appear roughly the same size within the film’s fixed 4:3 frame; it is up to you to decide what you are seeing.
Poor Things is strangely, even shockingly, hopeful, despite being the most overtly political film yet from Lanthimos. It is also arguably his first feminist film, though I suspect many will argue about its efficacy as such.
To peg the work of Bas Devos as that of a miniaturist only lays bare the limited language we use to describe a film, and our frustrating tendency to conflate budget (and runtime) with scope.
Lacey is our observer, but we sense that she does not really want to be. She tries to penetrate her mother’s sadness, but remains outside the adult world of her lovers and friends, pains and longings.
Household Saints is about the families lovers come from and the futures they build for themselves. It was a girl-meets-boy story with a “happily ever after” complicated by the wheels of fate.
You do not need to know that the filmmaker was inspired by the story of Oedipus to pick up on the evocation of this power of tragedy, or the setting in a heightened, mythic Greece. The film has an elemental strangeness that feels close to the world that ancient tragedy depicts: we see a forest, we see water, we see blood.
There is nothing new under the sun in the films of Alice Rohrwacher, which pay their respects to the beauty and mystery of older civilizations while suggesting that exploitation—of people, and of physical and spiritual resources— is almost as ancient as the world itself.
Like Godard, Radu Jude is acutely aware of how every image or sequence of images can be sorted into genres, textures, colors, references, and so on, categories whose associations stretch back into the whole of cinema’s past.
Older actors could have made these characters and their bond more emotionally resonant and credibly worn, marked by a sense of shared history and precious, always dwindling time.
For migrants and refugees, the earth becomes a cruel obstacle course in which they gamble with their lives. The Dupes (Al-Makhdu’un, 1972), directed by Tewfik Saleh, tells a searingly specific tale of displaced Palestinians trying to cross the desert to Kuwait.
The specter of ephemerality hangs over the exquisitely beautiful and moving The Taste of Things, a movie that is simultaneously about food in every possible sense and also not at all, one that treats the acts of cooking and eating with reverence while recognizing in them an entry point to something more profound.