Lawrence Garcia
Unrest exists at the confluence two crucial historical currents. Its title refers to the part of a watch known as the unrueh or balance wheel, whose oscillations regulate the entire mechanism, and thus to the rapid consolidation of factory labor that occurred in the late 19th century.
Like many an adoption drama, Return to Seoul does trace a search for personal identity. But the film is unusual in the degree to which its transformations conform to those of its protagonist, matching her changeability with its own destabilizing structural reinventions.
In placing us so fully within the complexities of the COVID-era present, Coma reveals our very inability to unify it in thought.
The Cathedral may be described as both a family melodrama and an oblique chronicle of American politics, spanning two decades. But the film is a far more discontinuous affair than such descriptions suggest.
Miguel Gomes is a director who tends to enfold question, answer, and, especially, non-answer, into his actual films. His latest, The Tsugua Diaries, co-directed with his partner Maureen Fazendeiro, is arguably the most systematic working-out of this tendency.
The filmmakers repeatedly return to one notable formal strategy: building up a link between two people across a given scene or shot, then punctuating it by cutting to a heretofore unseen observer.
First Time displays a conceptual rigor, its clear segmentation and wordless progression creating a characteristic, riddle-like fusion of sensation and mental reflection.
What Do We See? operates like a kind of benevolent human magic: it splits our attention between two poles, one natural, the other personal, between the coherent order of the natural spectacle and the driving personality behind it.
The TIFF Wavelengths program remains an essential overview of the goings-on in contemporary experimental cinema. Titles include Polycephaly in D, Dear Chantal, Inner Outer Space, The Capacity for Adequate Anger, and more.
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) runs a total of 480 minutes, or the span of an average workday. Shot for 27 weeks, spread out over a period of 14 months, it follows Tayoko Shiojiri over the course of five seasons, in her village in Kyoto Prefecture.
If the great dilemma of Fassbinder’s generation was how to connect to a tradition that had been, for a time, variously distorted and co-opted by National Socialism, Petra von Kant, with its connections to American Hollywood cinema, seemed to me like an auspicious reinvention.
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.
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.
The Last City continually trades on a pervasive, pointed sense of absurdity, underscoring our distorted perceptions of the world and its sundry surfaces.
In battling with paranoia and insomnia, and trying to make sense of the world, two writers go down separate wormholes—of an Australian faux-documentary horror movie and a Jacques Rivette tumble into conspiracy.
The basic premise trades in the kind of casual absurdism that’s by now expected of Porumboiu. More surprising is the fact that The Whistlers plays much like a standard policier—a relatively by-the-book offering from a director who has distinguished himself by a willingness to throw out the manual.
Appropriately enough given the wending paths of its volatile teenage heroine, the film occupies a state of arrested transformation, as if on the cusp of an epiphany that never quite arrives.
Though an adroit orchestrator of discrete scenes, Lapid has thus far struggled to construct wholly satisfying narrative containers for them. So if Synonyms stands as his most accomplished work to date, that is because it commits fully to an elliptical, disjunctive method.
No heroic Siegfried figure, Humberto is a feckless opportunist. And so his voiceover, which persists throughout the runtime, inevitably recalls the mobsters of Martin Scorsese, whose The Wolf of Wall Street Veiroj has cited as a conscious model.
Eloy Enciso’s Endless Night, Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever,Affonso Uchôa’s Seven Years in May, Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Krabi, 2562, James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s This Action Lies, Annie MacDonell’s Book of Hours, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, and more