Reviews
Amidst this stirring portrait of spiritual introspection runs a current of political malaise. It is most starkly felt though the stories shared by each of these houseless folk, laying bare the moral deficiencies at the rotten core of our social safety net, in a consumerist society obsessed with profit over public welfare.
There is something more than a little perverse about the release of this film at this particular moment. One need not lean too hard on its resonances in a year of sheltering in place, alone or in small numbers, accompanied only by a networked set of machines promising connection to a vast collection of media.
In most respects meticulously realized, the film shies away from too much dramatic elaboration, and often gets away with it because the premise (the spy who lost his soul) is both familiar and innately cinematic.
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?
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.
Despite its arrangement of miscellany, The Metamorphosis of Birds is a marvelously coherent work of intimate nonfiction, a documentary that unfolds idiosyncratically, like a dream.
If one anticipates the declassification of the FBI reports on MLK, are we then complicit in the invasion of his privacy and the attempt to racially stereotype him? This film insists that what the FBI did to King is emblematic of what this country does when it fears those who might undermine its entrenched hierarchies.
Throughout his career, Steven Soderbergh has displayed both a fascination with the ground-level manifestations of globalization and an ability to leverage the demands of capital into the very style and substance of his creative work.
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.
It comes as a relief that Francis Lee is not a punishing filmmaker. We are not made to observe Mary living out these well-documented instances of discovery and loss onscreen. Nor are we inclined to reduce her life to a quest for notoriety, foiled by Victorian paternalism.
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.