Reviews
The making of the play provides the dramatic scaffolding for the unfolding of life, but both the skit and the college life that surrounds it are presented as spontaneous, oblique, and devastating in their elisions.
Mohammad Rasoulof is part of a rich legacy of courageous Iranian filmmakers who have bravely challenged the authority and inevitability of the Islamic Republic, through resistance films that have often left them exiled from the homeland and people their art is fighting for.
It is a work of Robert Coover–like fabulation and Beckettian existential absurdity that highlights baseball’s incongruities and contradictions. There has not been a fictional sports movie quite like Eephus, which deliberately unravels itself at the seams.
Between the writtenness of the text and the flat planes of the modernist upstate house Martha has chosen as the location to end her life, the film’s melodrama tips into abstraction.
Self reflexive, political, and experimental, the filmisessentially the Carax take on Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988), in which Godard stitched together clips from hundreds of films in order to create his own critique of the art form.
The intention here was to make an erotic film without relying on or showing sexual acts. That was something I told myself from the very beginning: no one will make love this time.
Her first English-language feature, the film relinquishes some of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s steadily calamitous humor and Greek locales, while preserving her institutional critiques of capitalism and chauvinism.
Shot on 35mm in shades of ominous gray by cinematographer Lol Crawley in the mid-century VistaVision format, the film is so gripping moment to moment that it’s almost convincing in its determination to be a definitive American epic.
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.
Using an overtly erotic visual language that verges on the puritanical, Fargeat bludgeons the viewer, reducing men to slobbering wolves unable to contain themselves in the presence of a youthful woman. The film’s women have no artistic ambition beyond the thrill of being watched and fawned over.
The Featherweight actively engages with core ideas behind direct cinema and verité, residing in a blurry middle ground between the two genres, that is between minimizing a documentarian’s presence and actively participating in the action.
Schimberg has furthered his incisive dissection of the cinematic representation of disfigurement and disability. Adam Pearson returns as a lead in A Different Man—in which he not only gets to be effortlessly charming but even plays the Chad to another character’s Beta.
Rather than see the film as a tentative foray into fiction, it may be more useful to consider The Damned as a film that explores how one might have gone about making a documentary during the Civil War.
What is happening, or what has happened, in the obviously haunted space of Kelly-Anne’s mind and body is not something we are privy to, except via subtle context clues.