They discuss and debate the impact of the Harlem Renaissance, returning again and again to the relationship of art development and political struggle, as if orbiting around the topic might pull them closer to a definitive truth hovering just out of reach.
As distractingly writerly as the extended conversations may be, the teens are a convincing social organism; the way they speak, walk, or even just lounge together to take in a lesson as if they’ve all truly known each other for years.
The film conjures the magical highway consciousness of a thousand unknowable stories running parallel to one another, heartbreakingly circumscribed by the Autobahn lanes, and, here, the rigid camera angles and disciplined structural approach.
Schleinzer immersed himself in hundreds of known instances across centuries in which women became men for any number of reasons. The character of Rose is thus a composite figure, borne of this exploratory process but not beholden to the facts and figures of a single history.
Clashes between culture, craft, perception, and ego are the film’s droll MO, part and parcel of writer-director Nicolás Pereda’s deadpan and desiccated style.
Perhaps Everytime feels so elusive because it is most vividly recalled as a collection of details. There are about a half-dozen Big Images; they are formally audacious, given ample lead-up and thematic weight. But it is the smaller moments that take up residence in memory.
In My Wife Cries, we do not experience, or even see, what the characters experience, but are made constantly aware of the limitations of our own perspective.
Dreams, projections, flashbacks abound in The Unknown, but none of these are heralded or signposted, piling on an even greater level of mental disorientation, which Harari offers as a portal to greater organic understanding, both socially and cinematically.
A Day in the Life of Jo is a difficult movie to describe, both because of the way it unfolds and its manner of storytelling, which, three quarters of the way through, takes one of the boldest left turns in recent cinema.
Paper Tiger is Gray’s deftest and most moving film yet about how the assumptions Americans are fed about our ability to transcend class and economic standing are more quicksand than bedrock.
Through its sweeping scope, Possible Love trades the granular analysis of the particulars for a lucid picture of history as a repetitive structure that governs life under capitalism.
Wilson may occasionally play the fool, awkward and stammering, but he’s always more cunning than he lets on. In each encounter, Wilson engages his subjects with true curiosity, not making them the butt of a joke, but attempting to reveal what makes them worth documenting.
Amidst the nonstop chaos, the film finds something close to real pathos in using the communication gulf between the humans and aliens to excoriate xenophobia and ignorance.
Have you ever experienced a pleasurable, tingling sensation at the thought that somewhere out there, perhaps locked in a vault, stashed in a shoebox, or hidden in plain sight on the dusty shelves of an unassuming bookseller, lies a secret, suppressed, or once lost text that could change the course of humanity, unlock portals to other worlds, or reveal secret histories?
My cumulative understanding of her filmography continues to expand and shift, and I am so grateful for that. I think I'm still learning about Barbara Hammer to some degree. What I initially was so interested in was her turning the camera on herself.