Neighboring Scenes ends its short Film at Lincoln Center engagement today, and we are happy to be covering it for the first time in this, its fifth year. Celebrating contemporary Latin American cinema, in its myriad forms and cinematic modes, Neighboring Scenes uses big…
The majority of American moviegoers probably have no idea that the new comedy Downhill is a remake of 2014’s French/Swedish co-production Force Majeure, directed by Ruben Ostlund. And so, in an bid at fairness and imagination, this review will attempt to abstain from comparison…
Brian Eno will always be best known for his invention of ambient music (or at least its coinage) and for his work as the producer extraordinaire behind such classics as Remain In Light, The Joshua Tree, and Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, but the avant garde,…
Shot between August 2016 and January 2017 in the Dom Pedro Hotel in the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazilian filmmaker Maíra Bühler’s Let it Burn is a somber, delicate portrait of broken people living in limbo. The film has no on screen text or identifying…
When we open our eyes, what is it that we first see? There’s inanimate objects that we can recognize, but that requires several steps beyond the fundamental act of perception that occurs when one chooses to see the world around them. Before we can…
The Neighboring Sounds festival booklet describes Private Fiction as Argentinean filmmaker Andres Di Tella charting a turbulent 20th Century romance through archival photos and letters from his parents, Torcuato, an Argentinean man, and Kamala, a woman from India. Di Tella has indeed concocted an experimental, hybrid documentary,…
David Zonana’s Workforce possesses lofty artistic ambitions for a debut: it apes Bresson rather liberally, utilizing somber diegetic music cues, mostly non-professional actors, a relatively impressive depth of field, and an impending sense of looming morality as each impoverished character struggles to find an…
Marcelo Gomes’ Waiting for the Carnival unfolds in the village of Toritama, the self-proclaimed “capital of jeans,” in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Though it is a site of near-constant production, it has no factories as such, and is instead comprised of small household…
Miguel Hilari’s Compania is a small, modest gem of a film, a poetic evocation of mystical and religious ceremonies juxtaposed with the natural beauty of the agrarian and the banality of the urban. Although hardly novel (Carlos Reygadas has been mining similar material for years), it’s…
