Reviews
With its breathless, alert script, Blue Moon manages to keep expanding and contracting from its central dramatic concern, using the breakdown of Rodgers and Hart's creative partnership to tease out age-old paradoxes between art and commerce, hope and despair, commitment and compromise.
His obliviousness to anything beyond his chain link fence gestures to the political and cultural schism dividing much of America—between draft dodgers and patriots, rioters and the police, those fine with the status quo and those earnestly believing that things can change for the better.
It is by now a cliche to allege that the films of Luca Guadagnino offer more in the way of surface luxuries than intellectual stimulation, but the chasm is especially apparent in a film that at one point finds Roberts stiffly lecturing on the panopticon.
Eschewing the use of talking heads or a slate of statistics, director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the narrative largely from police bodycam footage—arguably the true crime idiom of the 2020s, taking the premise of Cops (1989–present) to its optimized conclusion: law enforcement is the camera crew.
A grotesque and grimly funny freak-out that unfolds with the hurtling momentum of a runaway train, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You marks the reemergence of its long dormant writer-director.
The very existence of this brash film, which reveals the hearts of darkness at the center of Cuba’s cultural institutions, is proof that creative expression may be hindered, or sometimes stalled, but it can never be stopped.
SVT trends towards paternal humanitarian coverage of Palestine during the First and Second Intifada. Unseen throughout, however, is how television was shaped by sociohistorical eras.
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.
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.