Reviews
Alboury will not come inside, and he will not go home, either; the more the two men try to feel each other out, the less likely it becomes that one or the other is going to budge. This is a compelling setup, sociologically and emotionally loaded.
Hamlet is invoked as a familiar revenge-plot classic, but that premise is mere window dressing. The characters from the play bear little resemblance to how they are written in it here, and are mostly marginal anyway, leaving the movie more like fanfiction than a seriously considered retelling.
Jenkin shot Rose himself on a 16mm Bolex with no live sound, opting to mix, record, and compose all of the film’s aural elements in postproduction. The uncanny effects of this approach lend his tactile imagery a subtle layer of distortion, the story seemingly echoed from a distant point in time.
Gavagai is a film about what happens when a European with good intentions tries to make a film set in Africa. His Matryoshka-esque films seek to question the inescapable racial hierarchies wrought by the violence and bloodshed of colonialism. But this film feels more like a bloodletting.
Shot on vintage Bolex cameras, the richly textured 16mm images emerge with the lightness of simplicity, which so charmingly mirrors the candid vignettes they capture.
Frailty and malice would be the simplest emotions to prescribe to a figure like Eleanora Duse, but Bruni Tedeschi opts for an unstoppable, pathetic hysteria. She finds wild variations on Duse’s foolishness that are, at turns, surprising, delightful, and haunting. There is a depth to her artifice.
Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to its questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water.
One Battle After Another unapologetically addresses the completely inexcusable injustices of contemporary American life while being incredibly funny, exciting, suspenseful, and poignant, particularly about the act of parenting a biracial child.
Johnson embodies this ethos from his shoulders to his thighs, but especially his eyes. When someone is on heroin, their eyes glaze over but do not defocus. It is not about the drowsy escape, it is the pleasure of balancing, for a moment, the mundane cruelties of life against an unstoppable contentment.
Where is the line between performance and reality when you are instructed to play yourself and not just any version, but your current version at the present moment? As the production progresses, the two men develop an independent friendship alongside their ideas about what this film is and how they should best live their lives.
The trouble with The History of Sound is not that its makers cannot imagine or depict these characters’ erotic bliss, however short-lived, in anything other than the most conservative terms, but that Hermanus, screenwriter Shattuck, and their leading men offer so little of conviction in its stead.
Anyone privileged enough not to work in the public-facing service economy was compelled to generate new at-home routines during the early days of COVID. More so than its (scant few) pandemic-set contemporaries, Suspended Time acutely understands how previously occupied mental space in adults became vacant for the first time.
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.
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.