Reviews
Shot between 2014 and 2017, the documentary observes life in four Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Lebanon and in several Indigenous American reservations across the United States, drawing parallels between the spaces and the oppression of the people within them.
The Holdovers feels less like a return to form than a retreat to safety. Its initial pretenses of unpleasantness mostly feel like winks at the audience.
Scorsese shows how the brutality of American history begins on the smallest scale, that the human capability for deception and self-justification breeds epochal, even genocidal shifts—microcosmic expressions of large-scale historical atrocity.
The Delinquents is not a high-octane crime thriller about fleeing the law, but a whimsical, delicate tale of self-fulfillment and liberation in a capitalist society, and a narrative that defies logic and realism for the sake of its own freedom.
Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order, but even though a character or prop might reappear across sections, and images occasionally rhyme, the chapters are distinct.
This hybrid courtroom drama-slash-psychological thriller is so conducive for both chin-stroking critical contemplation and a certain (highly rarefied) form of crowd-pleasing that it could just as easily have been engineered in a lab as crafted as a work of art.
Last Summer is not so much a provocation or the immersion in perversion that those who know only of the logline and Breillat’s career might be led to believe. This is a master class in emotional precision.
Both microscopic and galactic-sized things appear roughly the same size within the film’s fixed 4:3 frame; it is up to you to decide what you are seeing.
Lacey is our observer, but we sense that she does not really want to be. She tries to penetrate her mother’s sadness, but remains outside the adult world of her lovers and friends, pains and longings.
Household Saints is about the families lovers come from and the futures they build for themselves. It was a girl-meets-boy story with a “happily ever after” complicated by the wheels of fate.
You do not need to know that the filmmaker was inspired by the story of Oedipus to pick up on the evocation of this power of tragedy, or the setting in a heightened, mythic Greece. The film has an elemental strangeness that feels close to the world that ancient tragedy depicts: we see a forest, we see water, we see blood.
Older actors could have made these characters and their bond more emotionally resonant and credibly worn, marked by a sense of shared history and precious, always dwindling time.
For migrants and refugees, the earth becomes a cruel obstacle course in which they gamble with their lives. The Dupes (Al-Makhdu’un, 1972), directed by Tewfik Saleh, tells a searingly specific tale of displaced Palestinians trying to cross the desert to Kuwait.