Reviews
The comparatively bite-sized, almost four-hour The Woman Who Left feels like a work that could start to open Lav Diaz up to a larger U.S. audience in a way that Norte, the End of History, his last film distributed here did not.
The need to resolve the dangling narrative threads of popular works of art is truly a pox. If everything is spelled out, then there is no room left for mystery and imagination. It is always better to allow the mind to race just enough so that it deepens the things that we see and hear.
Over the course of a career that runs far deeper than just his 1994 groundbreaker Hoop Dreams, James has continually given classical documentary storytelling a good name.
An upper-crust costume drama without the courtly trappings or whalebone stiffness, the film has nary a tripod shot in sight, and moves along with a disconcerting, lurching motion.
Free Fire is often reminiscent of the cash-in Tarantino-esque titles that invaded video stores after Pulp Fiction, time capsules like 2 Days in the Valley, City of Industry, or 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, rather than being a new or exciting thing of its own.
Without ever seeming to reign supreme over the European festival scene as, say, the Dardenne brothers or Michael Haneke have at various points, Dumont anticipates and exemplifies features of the contemporary art film to a greater degree than either of those Cannes mainstays.
The Lost City of Z is beautiful, all the more so for not being beautiful in the obvious ways. Working for the second time with cinematographer Darius Khondji, who also shot The Immigrant, Gray films both jungle and English countryside with long lenses and a shallow depth-of-field.
A Quiet Passion proposes the outwardly unspectacular life of Emily Dickinson not as the story of a no-hoper spinster but as an act of courage, the struggle of a woman to overmaster herself, to sacrifice her own life (and preserve her maidenhead) so that her work might live.
Graduation drops viewers firmly in contemporary Romania, and offers the image of a nation where the trappings of modernity have been uneasily papered over a people and culture with a deep history of patriarchal tribalism.
The first live-action take on the material, a big-budget Western production from Paramount and DreamWorks, is a worthy addition to the canon, if still exceedingly dubious in a number of its particulars.
It is hard not to perceive something darkly subversive in the making of a film in which a beloved cinematic icon sits in bed, made up like a poodle and festooned in wig, frills, feathers, and fabrics, rotting away from gangrene while a whirlwind of bland and ill-equipped hangers-on try vainly to keep him preserved.
What happens when audiences have come to expect long-simmering, historically engaged Gesamtkunstwerks from a filmmaker and then are treated rapid-fire to a series of increasingly ungraspable present-day love stories? What is Malick doing in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song, and why now?
By centering on Helen, the film has a feminist streak, a badly needed course corrective for a musical genre whose histories overwhelmingly stem from the perspective of men worshipping at the altar of other men.
Kore-eda has explained that his latest film, After the Storm, is an unofficial sequel to his 2008 drama Still Walking. Both films contemplate the fresh wounds left by a deceased family member on the living; the former takes place over the course of a single day, the new film over several weeks.