In a perfect world, every family would have its own version of It Goes That Quick. This tender film from Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus captures the banality and the beauty of family with a cinematic flair that adds a distinct structural and artistic dimension to everyday conversations and events.
Just in my day-to-day life, if I am walking through the city at a very quick pace, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of details. I might not notice that the flowers are blooming. Likewise, being in a movie theater and sitting still for a time allows a viewer to really be able to appreciate those small movements.
I tend to shoot quickly, so I always have a little extra time every day to be able to have these moments that we call “bonuses.” There are moments where I didn't end up using what was scripted and only used what was improvised.
The second of the Five Precepts in Tibetan Buddhism addresses stealing, advising practitioners not to take what has not been given. 100 Sunset is a wintry work of slow cinema, is a meditation on what is taken, what is freely given, and what cannot be returned.
The number in question features a remarkable cinematographic trick, imagining a Harlem nightclub where leggy chorines seamlessly change skin color from white to Black and back again, accompanied by a bluesy torch song played by a Black jazz orchestra.
It is impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.
These explorations of the psychological effects of fame are mostly decorative, frequently splitting the difference between timeless and timeworn.
This humbling and quietly awe-inspiring first feature from Sophy Romvari could only half-accurately be described as an autobiographical coming-of-age drama . . . Her practice is grounded in the understanding that the real and the merely remembered are separated by the finest and slipperiest of lines.
To be honest, I think of Blue Heron as the origin story of all my films and life. My previous works were all trying to process things that happened relatively more recently, and Blue Heron in a way is what led to all those things. My brother is the beginning of our family’s stories.
The debut feature by Bronx native Joel Alfonso Vargas is an instant-classic New York Movie and a lively, sophisticated study of the interrelated imperatives of masculinity and money, grounded in the specifics of a Dominican family in an unaffordable city.
Working with Riz Ahmed, screenwriter Michael Lesslie reimagines Hamlet in a present-day multicultural London that allows for new layers to emerge: questions of agency and belonging in a society that, as you come of age, reveals itself to be more sinister than you had grown up thinking.
This inciting incident enables all manner of eccentric gags throughout The Drama, but little else. As with the Borgli cancel culture satire Dream Scenario (2023), a high-concept hook is aimed at a pressure point in the American zeitgeist and struggles to find purchase.
These eyes, the smile, the scowl (all features not then associated with computers) set the stage for the digital human emulation that is now a defining technique of 21st-century Hollywood, from de-aging to the sacrilegious reincarnations of dead actors, and even pervades our quotidian lives.
His films tend to observe this kind of context collapse as people, groups, communities, or even the entire world spiral. Think of the seeming imminent apocalypse of Cure, the suggested one of Charisma, or the fully realized one of Pulse. Chime fits this full arc into a mere 45 minutes.
For these characters, the past and the faraway become convenient displacements for their surrounding horrors. They ramble incoherently about Stalin and Putin, but they cannot seem to face their own regime—not even rhetorically.