Features
Close is the kind of actor who excels at navigating the delicate balance between intense physicality, brewing shrewdness, and shattering vulnerability, which is why even her most morally compromised characters nonetheless have familiar strokes of humanity and sympathy.
Talal Derki remains close to this family, capturing meals, the children in bed or at play, men chatting before heading off to combat, rendered as normal as getting into a car for a morning commute.
In the films of Corneliu Porumboiu, seemingly insignificant details, questions, and disagreements ripple outward, like pebbles tossed into a still pond, until they become deep inquiries into history, language, and ethics.
Once There Was Brasilia is a sci-fi epic about assassins from space and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, achieved on a shoestring budget.
A Few Great Pumpkins
The Invitation, The Ghost Train, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, A Scary Time, Messiah of Evil, Panna a netvor
In this mephitic atmosphere, an assertion of the sanctity of simple domestic pleasures (of pleasure itself) is tantamount to an act of artistic resistance.
The past is always present, but that does not just mean that it haunts or permeates our contemporary world: the past reconstitutes and recombines our very processes, internal and external, our molecules, our narratives.
Blake Williams has achieved a holistic union of his own that speaks at once to the transformative power of the moving image and the oceanic force of its full deployment.
Is Putin the cause or the result of Russia’s systemic ills? A tentative answer might be found in the Russian cinema of the 21st century, which, as it happens, coincides with the beginning and ongoing rule of this postmodern tsar.
The super-fan has progressed to secretary, then understudy, then professional and romantic usurper. Six years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All About Eve tapped a rich vein of existential panic tied to the theme of replication and replaceability.
Two halves form a harmonious whole in Feast of the Epiphany, the new feature from Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert and RS writer Farihah Zaman. Feast made its world premiere on June 23 at BAMcinemaFest 2018. More dates to come.
What of art then? Is its thrill ever about aesthetics alone? This question is just one of many raised by Barbara Visser’s smart, approachable, and entertaining documentary The End of Fear.
Gibson shows that filmmaking is an extension of a practice that is already proactive and lived. The evolving relationship between filmmaker and subject is retained implicitly in nearly every shot and interaction.
The Breadwinner is a simple story about a young girl who loves her father, but there are layers that acknowledge the complexities of the political situation in Afghanistan, children growing up in conflict, and the fact there are no easy answers.