Reviews
Trouble has emerged at a particularly critical point for Northern Ireland, where violent sectarian tensions have been reinvigorated with the uncertainty spawned by Brexit. What Garnett’s film contributes is an acceptance of profound complexity in the face of belligerent binaries.
The possibilities and pitfalls of autofiction are on full display in Pain and Glory, the 21st feature from Almodóvar, notably the only living international filmmaker popular enough to be broadly recognizable by his last name alone.
By doing away with narrative tricks or genre bending, Desplechin puts the focus on the performances, which provide a multifaceted and devastating study of urban desperation.
Like Rod Serling, director Aaron Shimberg is eager to expose our own biases, and here he thrills at luring us into a vertiginous series of alternate dimensions, seeking to unravel our ideas about the nature of beauty captured on camera.
Shooting their dog protagonists in often exquisitely intimate close-ups of grizzled maws, fleshy gums, and weathered paw pads, the filmmakers foreground their curious status as semi-wild beasts that subsist both in the middle and at the margins of human society.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is overcast with melancholy and fueled by a rueful self-determination to overcome it. It’s on the surface his simplest film, but somehow his trickiest to talk about.
To begin with, designed as a one-director anthology film, it picks up and disposes of various narrative threads rather than staying with the same plotline or plotlines (or absence of plot) throughout. Secondly, it depends almost not at all on real-time duration to fill itself out.
The specificity of China is largely displaced and obscured, and The Farewell never communicates the full force of its semi-connected scenes of sadness and lost identity.
The Mountain, the mournfully surreal, fitfully arresting fifth feature by Rick Alverson, describes America’s postwar “boom” as a spiritual implosion. And from the beginning of the 1950s-set film there’s no doubt that the patriarchy is the problem.
In exploring love, sex, death, and adultery this way, screenwriters Garrel and legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere adequately probe the meandering contours of relationships and commitment, as well as the elusive nature of monogamy and desire.
Aviles spent years developing her script by observing housekeepers at the same hotel where the film was shot. She accordingly grants the labor of her her protagonist a respect rarely seen onscreen.
Wild Rose insists on maintaining a wide-eyed and likable tone even as its protagonist offers glimpses of the deep-seated self-absorption that accompanies a person determined to live a life devoted to artistic expression.
The film, whose title sounds like an apocalyptic Simon and Garfunkel song, paints a portrait that raises questions of identity, authenticity, and our relationship to home.
Instead of tracing the more settled trajectory of the film—a gradual fall from grace to match the early passage from unfettered youth to straitened middle age—it seems more apropos to focus on his ecstatic cinematic orchestrations, which are, not to put too fine a point on it, the main attraction.