Reviews
All we see, throughout the 72 minutes of A Frown Gone Mad, are bloody faces and the back of Bouba’s arm administering the shots. But the specter of war and death in the Lebanese capital hovers like a shroud.
The film asks its audience to question the very nature of narratives, of artifice, of truth, fiction, and the mechanisms artists use to achieve their ends.
Windless is rigorously pictorial with centrally composed shots and the linear perspective of Renaissance art, where the relative size, shape, and position of objects is organized around imagined lines converging at a point on the horizon. But even though the film upholds those conventions, it also makes room for the character to resist or break them.
His films occlude the presence of human labor and consumption. Instead, he spotlights the empty, spaceship-like labs and warehouses where meat of all kinds is processed or artificially created before it is packaged by automated robots and sent off to supermarkets.
Lina intuitively understands that the anguish the time with her father will cause her is part of the price for a film that exposes in stark terms the workings and results of toxic masculinity.
When compressed to a dry-sounding logline, The Shipwrecked Triptych is an anthology film about postwar German cultural identity and social exclusion; Eroglu is Danish-Turkish and was educated in Berlin, which frames his perspective on the country. But the film is not a history lesson.
In both On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and I Am Not a Witch, the previous film by Rungano Nyoni, women are tasked with laboring and bringing normalcy to an off-kilter world, choosing to seek out other planes of existence to forge kinships and form communities.
While the screenplay might not properly evince the feeling of being an expendable, Robert Pattinson perfectly portrays someone who has thoroughly internalized their mortality.
It is a work that highlights the incongruities and contradictions of baseball. There has not been a fictional sports movie quite like Eephus, which deliberately unravels itself at the seams.
This is not a movie that marvels at the throes of human despair, or at the preternatural resilience of one particular woman. It is instead a movie in which a mother chooses to carry on in fervid defiance, paving a way for her five children to do the same.
Matthew Rankin uses Universal Language to conduct a dialogue with Iranian cinema, utilizing hallmarks of its New Wave masters.
If A Silent Voice fixated on navigating guilt and Liz and the Blue Bird tapped into the anxieties of love, The Colors Within is all about balancing the expectations others have of us with the limitless possibilities that exist before we are pigeonholed in certain roles.
Soderbergh achieves an effectively fraught air from the jump so that his scenes, even at their stillest, vibrate with the breath-seizing possibility of menace; we are continually and acutely aware that the domestic fracases and solitary activities depicted are being witnessed by eyes without a face.
Its willingness to paint sixties establishment folkies as potentially just as extractive as their more legibly villainous record mogul counterparts would have meant something if the film had any interest in actually investigating the prickly relationship between art and commerce.