Reviews
As Soderbergh, in his mini-mogul practice, endeavors to hack out new routes leading around the established economic order of filmmaking, his films depict men and women doing their best to negotiate contingency plans for the perilous environment created by a carnivorous economy on the prowl.
The meticulously detailed wasteland that Anderson has created is rendered with his typical craft and care . . . Yet in ethnically delineating its humans, the film sets up a curious, racially coded divide between dogs and the Japanese.
Depardon is not out to expose naked cruelty, neglect, and dereliction of duty, as Wiseman and Wang do in their films, but something much more subtly invidious: the revolving-door efficiency of the state apparatus, mechanized service behind a blandly humane smile.
Black Panther is an unsettling experience. A sexy and entertaining blockbuster, the third feature by Coogler following Creed and Fruitvale Station is also a sad and perverse object. Its provocative ambiguity reveals itself only gradually.
Adapting the convoluted yet scant language of the text is in itself a catch-22: total fidelity to the novel risks attracting the same denunciations that flagged the author for decades; but disloyalty jeopardizes the respect of a dedicated fanbase.
The film thrives on translation, communication, and perception. Like the screwball comedies of yore, it revolves around a romantic conflict that its protagonist does not fully comprehend, though here this situation is reduced from the fanciful to the quotidian.
Berlin 2018: Loznitsa is an assiduous practitioner of observational cinema. One may even argue that his nonfiction filmmaking is to the study of spaces charged with political memory what Frederick Wiseman is to the exploration of institutions.
The distance between the banality of life and the sublime of cinema seems practically unbridgeable. This sense that transcendence is elusive to us mere mortals is the explicit subject of the film.
The first thing you should know is that Western is not really a western. Valeska Grisebach draws upon genre iconography and mythos, but to take the comparison further requires wishful, willful thinking, an act of projection that the filmmaker cannily encourages and exploits.
This portrayal of an ugly divorce functions as a commentary on the dysfunctional post-Soviet, post-Communist Russia, where nothing holds value other than money and the desire to earn more of it.
In his five films, Perry has exclusively written irredeemably selfish characters, who opt to remain in their own comfort zones, yet he sustains a consistent empathy, never dismissing or torturing them. There is a Sisyphean desperation to their yearnings.
There is a formal adventurousness here typical of Kurosawa, who has seesawed between genres both throughout his career (horror, sci-fi, and dramas like Tokyo Sonata) and within individual films (Doppelganger transitions from a loss-of-identity thriller to a sort of satirical romance). The constant element is a sure-footed aesthetic precision.
In 24 Frames, the boundary that separates still photograph from motion picture proves to be beside the point, much as it is immaterial to the impact of the heady Kiarostami romance Certified Copy whether the central couple are long-term partners or total strangers.
Avoiding the sweeping grandiosity and visual tidiness of so many period pieces, Thomas brings a deeply tactile approach to her first solo feature, which is set in the mountains of 19th-century Brazil.