Reviews
Fire Will Come, with its single location and small cast, is a more focused work than Mimosas, but maintains a similar sense of possibility as the earlier film, of things unknowable to the viewer. What’s really important may be happening somewhere outside of the frame.
The Calming consists of tableaux as elegant and precise as blocks of ice, fixing Lin in the solitude of hotel rooms, cars, trains, and parks, or in moments of hushed chitchat with a curator in Tokyo, a colleague in Beijing, a friend in Hong Kong.
In adapting London’s novel, Marcello and his screenwriting partner Maurizio Braucci have transposed Eden’s story from turn-of-the-century Oakland to the coast of Naples, but they’ve also left the question of when intentionally unresolved, indeterminate.
Tragic Jungle is best approached with fairy-tale logic in mind. Olaizola hints at the possibly supernatural nature of the transformation of Agnes by vacillating between the perspectives of the chicleros and their leader.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign and shot sporadically over a period of two to three weeks on 16mm, Slow Machine has all the features of the rough-and-tumble New York indie, and it wears this vintage shabbiness as a badge of pride.
Filming in various countries across the northern Levant, though never specifying which from scene to scene, Rosi chooses small, spare stories that are more concerned with affecting the viewer than informing them.
While her emotional world remains hidden to us, we nonetheless feel an intimacy with Yana as she nestles herself into the vastness of her environment.
McQueen toggles between fiction and historical recreation, all the while attempting to imbue nuance and depth to a depiction of black life in the West Indian community of London from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Diving fully into the fantastical, Green has here turned the allegorical dimensions of his prior films inside out. Steeped in myth and satirical humor, the film betrays a playfully perverse sense of humanity and moral comeuppance.
The new Jia documentary may not have the aesthetic boldness of his best work, but it illuminates the proximity of fiction and nonfiction in his oeuvre and doubles as something of a directorial mission statement, highlighting the role of the artist in writing and preserving history.
Note the staging of his scenes here, how people almost always have some physical object between them as they share increasingly intimate details about their lives, or how that physical object, like a plate of freshly cut apples, can be used to close distance in the presence of silence.
This first foray into scripted narrative by documentarian Heidi Ewing trembles with longing. In this nonlinear, decades-spanning romance about an undocumented gay couple from Mexico, Ewing paints the first blush of love as a neon-lit meet cute, a first kiss beneath a purple dawn.
Its gender dynamics disorient the era Garrel is trying to convey. Is this a retro love letter to a bygone era when it was still possible for a bus stop meet-cute to blossom into a full courtship; when long-distance lovers unironically corresponded through postcards?
Night of the Kings is a testament to a more inclusive future: actors are sourced not only from Abidjan but also from France and Burkina Faso, and the director pointedly serves us up a medley of western art touchstones and West-African traditions.