Reviews
Schimberg has furthered his incisive dissection of the cinematic representation of disfigurement and disability. Adam Pearson returns as a lead in A Different Man—in which he not only gets to be effortlessly charming but even plays the Chad to another character’s Beta.
Rather than see the film as a tentative foray into fiction, it may be more useful to consider The Damned as a film that explores how one might have gone about making a documentary during the Civil War.
What is happening, or what has happened, in the obviously haunted space of Kelly-Anne’s mind and body is not something we are privy to, except via subtle context clues.
The setting is a small village on the north coast of Iran. At its edge is a strip of shoreline nearly always crowned by a diadem of dense haze. The film, which is almost unforgiving in its succession of gorgeously photographed imagery, is about what reaches through this liminal boundary from the outside world.
Close Your Eyes is primarily a movie about growing old and the power of memory, with cinema as its central metaphor. The underlying tension throughout all of Erice’s work is that which lies between the still and the moving image, between the desire to freeze time and the inevitability of its passage.
Would someone moved by the familial bonds honored onscreen also be encouraged to reconsider the larger carceral system? Or would they simply judge the fathers for making “bad decisions” that keep them from their children?
Just as Hitchcock noted that the best suspense comes from letting the audience in on the secret, Shyamalan forces the viewer to wait, wonder, and witness as Trap’s villain protagonist navigates his escape from the trap that has been set for him.
Understandably the film’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, are not interested in the inherently comic potential of their material, even if they cite Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as an influence. After all, people, this is no laughing matter.
The debut feature of writer-director India Donaldson pivots on a young woman’s realization that it is sometimes wisest to keep those we love at an arm’s length.
No longer confined to their home countries, its characters practically teleport between locations, their paths crisscrossing in ways that quickly become impossible to track. Across the runtime, individuals relate dreams, hallucinations, and memories of things that we’ve already seen or will see.
You do not need to know that the filmmaker was inspired by the story of Oedipus to pick up on the evocation of this power of tragedy, or the setting in a heightened, mythic Greece. The film has an elemental strangeness that feels close to the world that ancient tragedy depicts: we see a forest, we see water, we see blood.
Kinds of Kindness presents us with a world of women living at the mercy of petty men. But the men don’t seem to know what they’re doing either. There’s a childlike nature to all the male characters, driven by the desire to get what they want and be respected in order to keep their egos intact.
Last Summer is not so much a provocation or the immersion in perversion that those who know only of the logline and Breillat’s career might be led to believe. This is a master class in emotional precision.