Reviews
A lot has been written about Baumbach’s fondness for intricately arranged dysfunction, and there is something a little bit sadistic about creating two such painfully codependent pathologies and bouncing them off of each other at feature-length.
Right off the bat, The Runaways asserts itself as a period piece in more ways than one: the year, 1975, is superimposed over the first shot, which draws our attention to a clot of blood that drops like a ripe fruit from in-between a young girl’s slightly parted, mini-skirted thighs.
Marco Bellocchio sets history a-twirl in the opening minutes of his Cannes-buzzed melodrama Vincere, cutting between set-ups in Trent 1907 and Milan 1914 and back again, tripping the wire on linear narrative with rapid-fire bursts of under-contextualized, nonsynchronous events. We are somewhere in time.
Sitting in the darkness of the theater, watching others experiencing the performance at some previous time, the concert-film viewer is always stuck on the outside, unsure whether to clap, stomp, or sing along or just watch reverently.
Besides its undeniably juicy story, perhaps what most distinguishes Prodigal Sons, and what makes its point of view so valuable, is that it’s imbued with the non-patronizing, searching voice of a transgender filmmaker.
What will future generations of film folk make of the countless American indies made in the latter half of the twenty-first century’s inaugural decade that follow inarticulate youths as they graze absent-mindedly through overgrown fields of urban anomie?
As Ghost Town drifts through its three loosely organized chapters, each populated by lonely and disaffected people just trying to scrape by, we gradually come to understand their skepticism.
In its achingly precise mise-en-scène, its deeply affecting elegiac tone, its finely calibrated performances, and, yes, its straight-up knee-slapping silliness, Mother represents the work of an astonishingly talented narrative filmmaker at the height of his abilities
Alvarez’s first step in wrenching Easier with Practice out of its aesthetic stranglehold is acknowledging the importance of the close-up.
Don Argott’s documentary chronicles the little-known rivalries, politics, and scandals that cloud the history of this monumental collection and its owner, battles that still rage today.
Rather than seeing Audiard as a successor to Bresson or Scorsese, it is more helpful to our understanding of A Prophet to position Audiard within France's post-war existentialist literary tradition, and more specifically alongside the work of Albert Camus.
It’s easily the most “genre” film of this late pack, both in conception and execution, and the one that remains most trapped within its circumscribed horror boundaries.
With the possible exception of the post-Tarantino crime thriller, has any genre been as good to American independent film over the past 20 years as the family dramedy?
Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, a starkly designed inquiry into the nature of miracles, exists in a lineage of films that includes Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse, Jacques Rivette’s The Nun, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, and professed inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Ordet.