Reviews
Though several of his films skirt around and pick up themes and situations from the Russian author’s most venerated work, Norte is Lav Diaz’s first full-throated stab at Crime and Punishment.
Story-wise, little happens over the course of Exhibition’s run time (though the sex does improve considerably). Unbound to a conception of time as mere forward progression, Hogg luxuriates in the endless sensations one can experience at any given moment.
If Test feels like something of a minor-key revelation, it is in part because it attempts to locate the rhythms of commonplace existence at a time when each instant was imbued with almost existential uncertainty.
Once we discover the crux of the film—what the central threat of Eden Parish is—it’s revealed that West has traded his refreshing classicism for the tastelessness and slapdash technique that defines our contemporary horror moment.
Whatever conversations about environmental activism, radical politics, or even the desperate state of contemporary agriculture are ambiguously raised in the first half of the film end up as prelude to the second’s increasingly standard “crime doesn’t pay” thriller elements.
It has become obligatory to talk about each new Manoel de Oliveira film by observing how remarkable it is that there is a new Manoel de Oliveira film.
James Gray’s boldly titled The Immigrant begins with a shot of Lady Liberty herself, apt for a film about a woman seeking emotional freedom in exile.
To evoke his film’s early 1960s, Soviet-era Poland setting, Pawlikowski not only shot Ida in black-and-white but also used the 4:3 academy aspect ratio, recalling such Eastern European classics of the era like Loves of a Blonde and Closely Watched Trains.
Produced under the aegis of Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's film Manakamana seems to engage with something like a phenomenology of attention.
Jim Jarmusch’s films have a knack for catering to (and implicitly confirming) the tastes of their ideal viewers: the record collectors crate-digging for that near-mint promo copy of Rain Dogs; the aging punks jostling for a front-row spot at a Stooges show; the adventurous indie kids braving a doom metal set.
The reason is that a section of the U.S. comic fraternity (the likes of Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell) has seen something the vast majority of the American public hasn’t yet, and that something is what Coogan does better than anything else: Alan Partridge.
The makers of this third-rate, tawdry pile of nonsense are no doubt delighted that such an A-lister took a shine to their script, because otherwise it would surely never have seen the light of day.
It Felt Like Love could have been another lock-up-your-daughters cautionary tale à la Thirteen, but is instead remarkably nonjudgmental.
Nymphomaniac is something of a sarcastic thumbs-up for Lars the iconoclast: its scenario of a woman narrating her own erotic awakening—which then turns into a kind of all-night bender, spanning decades and the best body-and-soul baring efforts of two actresses—is easily seen as a sort of run-on director’s commentary track.