Reviews
The theme of honor among thieves, and its embedded suggestion that outlaw principles are a form of resistance in a fundamentally lopsided society, is fulfilled at epic length in the new Jia Zhangke crime drama Ash Is Purest White.
The slow escalation throughout the film builds to show quite clearly how the confluence of time, boredom, prejudice, and weaponry create a situation with devastating consequences for all involved.
There is not much the audience is allowed to learn about Lara beyond her being trans and a ballerina. To make matters worse, Dhont makes a visual obsession out of her anatomy and otherness.
The transfixing close-ups of Jamaicans are evidence that the eye is the window to the soul; each dead-on stare into the lens heightens the personal and political histories overlaid on the soundtrack.
3 Faces is the most freeform and expansive of the cycle of movies that has come to define the latter part of his filmography, and, crucially, it is the film that brings him back to the feminist concerns that fueled so many of his definitive earlier works.
What suffers the most from this LSD-induced breakdown of social order is the sanctity of distinctly hetero-normative values: the innocence of the child, the heterosexual couple, the pregnant mother.
While there are many aspects binding Transit to Barbara and Phoenix (including an oppressive system, embodied here by the vagaries of international migration in wartime), Petzold is working in a slightly different register; it is at once more rigorously conceptual and less sociopolitically specific than its predecessors.
In demystifying the process of getting into one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, she exposes the ambivalence about race and class and the overall blindness to conversations surrounding diversity and inclusion that remain at the core of these institutions.
Sorry Angel, by design, chronicles a decade of death and uncertainty yet is more driven by the emotional specificity of queer love, laying bare its conundrums without any pretensions to universalization.
This feeling for that bygone world of freshwater creeks and tilled fields and as-yet-uncleared woods is one of the chief inducements recommending The Lincoln Cycle, consisting of ten two-reel episodes whose direction is credited to their star Benjamin Chapin.
La Isla de la Fantasia floods four times a year, and then re-emerges as before; the narrative of Los Silencios behaves in a similar manner, revealing visions or bits of information before submerging them time and again.
By primarily defining Glass in formal, thematic, and ethical opposition to the adaptations he believes have been widely mistaken for the pinnacle of comic book form, Shyamalan here is unable to loosely interpret and interpolate the genre as he did in Unbreakable.
Clips culled from cinema and reportage flicker and transform before our eyes in a barrage of changing aspect ratios, contrast levels, and color saturation intensities; gnomic pronouncements and aphorisms (some translated, others not) boom and crackle over a detailed 7.1 sound mix.
Faced with promoting such a difficult-to-pitch property, Universal decided instead to cut its losses, keeping the movie hidden from press until its unceremonious arrival in theaters was imminent, so that now it becomes a story only on the basis of its spectacular box-office failure, a foregone conclusion.