Reviews
Shot between 2014 and 2017, the documentary observes life in four Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Lebanon and in several Indigenous American reservations across the United States, drawing parallels between the spaces and the oppression of the people within them.
The Holdovers feels less like a return to form than a retreat to safety. Its initial pretenses of unpleasantness mostly feel like winks at the audience.
Scorsese shows how the brutality of American history begins on the smallest scale, that the human capability for deception and self-justification breeds epochal, even genocidal shifts—microcosmic expressions of large-scale historical atrocity.
The Delinquents is not a high-octane crime thriller about fleeing the law, but a whimsical, delicate tale of self-fulfillment and liberation in a capitalist society, and a narrative that defies logic and realism for the sake of its own freedom.
This hybrid courtroom drama-slash-psychological thriller is so conducive for both chin-stroking critical contemplation and a certain (highly rarefied) form of crowd-pleasing that it could just as easily have been engineered in a lab as crafted as a work of art.
Both microscopic and galactic-sized things appear roughly the same size within the film’s fixed 4:3 frame; it is up to you to decide what you are seeing.
Household Saints is about the families lovers come from and the futures they build for themselves. It was a girl-meets-boy story with a “happily ever after” complicated by the wheels of fate.
Older actors could have made these characters and their bond more emotionally resonant and credibly worn, marked by a sense of shared history and precious, always dwindling time.
For migrants and refugees, the earth becomes a cruel obstacle course in which they gamble with their lives. The Dupes (Al-Makhdu’un, 1972), directed by Tewfik Saleh, tells a searingly specific tale of displaced Palestinians trying to cross the desert to Kuwait.
La Práctica is a return to for Martin Rejtman to the seriocomic stylings of his early work that finds the director navigating a very different economic landscape, one shaped by the neoliberal reforms of the ’90s but transformed by the ongoing recession and the attendant rise in freelance labor.
Mostly using shots in which witnesses sharing their testimonies turn their backs turned to the camera, de la Orden emphasizes their spoken memory while avoiding a visual exhibition of atrocities.
Melancholy co-exists with tenderness and tranquility; the isolation felt by the characters slowly eases as their connections to the world around them become more apparent.
Using pirated media, found/remixed footage, and some clever edits, the two-person Australian art collective known as Soda Jerk has constructed a film, Hello Dankness, that attempts to illustrate the five-year span from 2016 to 2021 across several acts.