Reviews
Ironically for Park Chan-wook, idolized for his male revenge fantasy Oldboy, the film is an attempt at feminist filmmaking. Its structure embodies not only the female gaze but also female subjectivity, the subconscious, memory, and so on, with swift camera movements and alternating chronologies.
Probably the most impressive thing about Under the Shadow is how it manages to integrate the social and political realities of its chosen time and place into the demands of a genre narrative.
Her ability to wrangle A-list talent for her B-minus budgeted productions, is a testament to talent, self-determination, and judicious sense of adaptability—all of which could be descriptors of the people we see onscreen in Certain Women.
In Aquarius, a woman in her sixties faces threats (some real, some perhaps imagined) to her continued existence in the titular three-story beachfront apartment building she has lived in for decades and which developers hope to raze and replace with a lucrative high rise project.
The tension in Sieranevada is between the various lies told and recalled by its characters and the relentless objectivity of its camera, which swoops, pans, hovers, lurks, sulks, and retreats in sync with its subjects but, crucially, does not embellish.
American Honey is one of those movies where you can take any demerit and explain it away as an attempt to exemplify something of its subject. Maybe its malnourished heft reflects our obesity epidemic?
There is nothing here that comes close to the subliminally effective terror of the original. Instead, Wingard expectedly goes for full-throttle, high-decibel horror, amping up the Blair Witch model for the ADHD generation, providing an endless array of false scares and loud crashes.
A thousand different films could have resulted from this tale, and most of them would have been stirring schmaltz at best, but the property fell into the hands of Clint Eastwood, at age 86 one of the most fundamentally sound and unaffectedly idiosyncratic directors making multiplex movies today.
Philippe Faucon’s films, especially his more recent ones, which focus on the French-Arab experience, show an affection for domestic workers, their gestures and the spaces their bodies navigate.
Happy Hour has a rambly, digressive quality that belies the precision of its construction. After an opening that establishes its core ensemble cast of four 37-year-old female friends, the movie is pulled hither and thither by each of their individual stories, intersecting again only to break off into different routes.
It has no intention to disrupt its audiences or get them to question their own notions about death and mourning. Nor does it need to: Moretti’s film is no less personal for being straightforward in its aims, sketching a fleet portrait of the difficulties of balancing personal challenges and professional goals.
While the plot is fictional, Ixcanul at times can feel like a documentary, as Bustamante captures a very real culture that exists in this world. Descendants of the Mayan civilization, Kaqchikel people still reside in the central region of Guatemala—and in fact served as characters in the film.
In the Afghanistan conflict thriller Neither Heaven Nor Earth, something unexpected emerges from, and eventually overtakes, standard battlefield movie clichés.
The latest film by Ira Sachs is set in contemporary Brooklyn, a place overrun with white transplants who have made a habit of pricing out lifelong black and Latino residents.