Reviews
By calling attention to what images are projected and received, Ruth Beckermann reveals the process by which narratives can be made and unmade.
Dano bends the contours of the coming-of-age drama by examining what is happening around his protagonist rather than to him.
Life exquisitely pours forth out of If Beale Street Could Talk, a film that seems to move on unceasing currents of emotion, of love and pain, of big heartaches and small joys, of revelations and disillusionments.
The brilliance of the film is in its show-and-not-tell ethos; the history reverberating beneath the narrative speaks to characters striving for democracy and freedom, or some semblance of them.
To begin with, designed as a one-director anthology film, it picks up and disposes of various narrative threads rather than staying with the same plotline or plotlines (or absence of plot) throughout. Secondly, it depends almost not at all on real-time duration to fill itself out.
While there are many aspects binding Transit to Barbara and Phoenix (including an oppressive system, embodied here by the vagaries of international migration in wartime), Petzold is working in a slightly different register; it is at once more rigorously conceptual and less sociopolitically specific than its predecessors.
3 Faces is the most freeform and expansive of the cycle of movies that has come to define the latter part of his filmography, and, crucially, it is the film that brings him back to the feminist concerns that fueled so many of his definitive earlier works.
Just like the world we live in, where the inequalities between rich and poor and male and female only grow crueler and less escapable, the rage that undergirds Burning is instantly familiar.
The repetitiveness of his project lulls us into surprising moments of realization. We are trained, as when Ji-young repeats herself, to fix our eyes on the slight alterations between films.
Clips culled from cinema and reportage flicker and transform before our eyes in a barrage of changing aspect ratios, contrast levels, and color saturation intensities; gnomic pronouncements and aphorisms (some translated, others not) boom and crackle over a detailed 7.1 sound mix.
In exploring love, sex, death, and adultery this way, screenwriters Garrel and legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere adequately probe the meandering contours of relationships and commitment, as well as the elusive nature of monogamy and desire.
In telling her tale of the eternally disenfranchised, Rohrwacher defies standards of storytelling, character, and even time itself.
This might seem to suggest a bit of a creative about-face, for Happy Hour, running a bit over five hours, was not precisely a commercial proposition, but in fact Asako I & II, in the space of two incident-heavy hours, works in every bit as much feeling and active intelligence as its predecessor.
The accomplishment of Roma is experiential. Its attention to sound, setting, and how bodies and things occupy space have the effect of radically aligning the viewer to a particular perspective that is fully located within the narrative world of the film.