Mad Bills to Pay

“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) — but no one said anything about hustling. Rico (Juan Collado), the 19-year-old at the movie’s center, might not work straight, but he works hard. He spends a sweltering New York summer lugging a cooler down Orchard Beach hawking nutties, or nutcrackers, the ultra-sweet and legally dubious homemade hard drinks that have become a staple of the Bronx’s relentless July heat. He’s a natural: when you make a purchase from Rico, you feel less like you’ve bought some cold juice and liquor mixed in a stranger’s kitchen than you have an endless summer night. He is effervescent as he bounces between customers, and when he decides his shift is over, he might crack a nutty himself, hit a house party, or head home to bicker with his sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro), and love on his mom, Andrea (Yohanna Florentino). Life for Rico overflows with the promise of being young, the threat of adulthood nothing more than a puff of smoke in the sea breeze.

That is, until Rico learns he got a 16-year-old named Destiny (Destiny Checo) pregnant. His mom rakes him over the coals, but family is family, and soon enough, they welcome Destiny into their home, where she sits on Rico’s bed like a caged bird, so bowled over by life’s curveball that she can barely speak or eat for the first few days in her new home. Getting an underage girl pregnant might send most into a tailspin, but for Rico, it’s just another spinning plate to keep in the air. He drinks deeply from life, from family; he trusts in youth’s providence and wields it like a pistol, even if he struggles to see when he’s shooting himself in the foot.

Vargas has described Mad Bills as “a piece of the Bronx, a love letter to New York City, and a celebration of Uptown/Dominican culture,” and his debut teems with the hot noise that floods a room through an open window on the Grand Concourse. The director cut his teeth shooting projects that live between the borders of narrative and documentary work, and Mad Bills pulses with the vérité sensibilities formed by filming real people in their real lives. Vargas’ cast comprises first-timers and actors who have so far flown under the radar, a fact that’s revealed not through amateur work — you’d be hard pressed to find more compelling performances among the other freshman-class films Mad Bills neighbors in press junkets and film fests — but in their proximity to the folks you might pass on your walk to catch the train to work. Mad Bills parallels the wide-eyed lifeblood that runs through the earlier work of John Cassavetes; cinematographer Rufai Ajala trades Cassavetes’ handheld camera for a series of calculated still shots, but Rico’s maddening propensity to charm his way into and through mistake after mistake would fit comfortably among Husbands’ overgrown knuckleheads.

Soon enough, Rico folds Destiny into his beachside nutty hustle, and the reservations that bound her inside the apartment unfurl to reveal a fully rendered girl from the city: someone who loves sugary cereal and misses her mom, who is quick to call Rico on his bullshit but looks dreamily toward the child they have on the way, who holds aspirations of going back to school and building a better life for her new family than what she’s known. The young love between Collado’s Rico and Checo’s Destiny is the well from which Mad Bills draws its strength. The actors have little more than a handful of credits in shorts and TV spots between them, but they perform the full spectrum of youth’s impulsive idealism with the bravado of seasoned indie vets.

Destiny brings out the best in Rico, and her grasp on the couple’s cresting adulthood siphons the tenderness he holds for his family and community into strings of forward thinking that can occasionally approximate responsibility. Still, Vargas never forgets that his story is about two kids; the opportunism and charm that make Rico a pro at slinging cold drinks are just as quick to send him stumbling drunk toward the wrong stranger and tie him up with the cops. Vargas’ diligence behind the camera keeps Mad Bills from ever steering toward a morality play, but he’s not hesitant to let his subjects scrape their knees. To watch Rico and Destiny trip over themselves on their way toward the straight and narrow is to stomach the dread of knowing that your own kids are capable of every mistake you’d made at their age.

With Mad Bills, Vargas achieves the rare sort of debut feature that functions less as a promise of future work than it does a holistic insight of current competency. It’s an assured product of empathy and experience; countless directors have scribbled off love letters to the Big Apple, but few have offered such thorough proof of their time spent talking shit with neighbors across fences, of wincing toward LED army recruitment ads on the stairs down to the train, of watching the kid down the block get drunk for the first time and wondering whether you should say something to his mom. But Mad Bills’ biggest feat might be its refusal to punish its subjects or its audience for experiencing life: one way or another, the kids are growing up. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG

No Sleep Till

Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach to depicting the apocalypse, the meteorological kind we’re so used to by now, exacerbated by the untamable will of man, is to immerse us in the eerie stillness of its prelude. Her characters may be separated by their own story threads, but their siloed experiences belie a curious, subconscious tether; it compels them to linger where perhaps they shouldn’t, to return even after committing to leave.

No Sleep Till drops the viewer gently into the mundanity of life in small-town Florida — Atlantic Beach, to be exact. June (Brynne Hofbauer), a teenager with a part-time job at a beach-side souvenir shack, spends her evenings floating in the leaf-strewn calm of the community pool, while the staff whisper to each other in French, and other swimmers get in workouts of varying intensity. At a local dive bar, stand-up comedian Will (Jordan Coley) and his reluctant partner Mike (Xavier Brown-Sanders) put on a show of comedy and sly, though corny, deception, if not to blow their disinterested audience away than to at least keep themselves entertained.

Elsewhere, storm-chaser Taylor (Taylor Benton) stalks the periphery of the coming disaster. His loneliness is more pronounced than the others, more tragic in its literalness; when he speaks over the radio or records himself on his phone, he seems to suggest a life lived on the anxious edges of stability, though any ambiguity over his living situation is clarified when a stranger sees inside his truck and offers him a place to sleep.

June, Taylor, and Will and Mike might know each other, and they might not. For the purposes of Simpson’s project, their physical separation is all the more illustrative of their psychological connection. In this way, No Sleep Till feels indebted to a filmmaker like Tsai Ming-liang. Both he and Simpson have an intimate handle on the clandestine nature of loneliness, the kind you don’t speak of, don’t show, or merely can’t express. In Tsai’s Vive L’Amour, for example, three characters occupy an empty apartment unit, their lives separate from each other, never to cross unless in the most (comically) dire of circumstances. In No Sleep Till, suburban malaise takes the place of its urban sibling, and the skeletons of McMansions replace empty, high-rise apartments; but the aching desire to be a part of something is the same.

Where No Sleep Till eschews the traditional markers of narrative storytelling, it makes up for in real-life, communal charm. Simpson sourced her loose stories, and the quietly complex characters at their centers, from the same town in Florida in which the film was made and set, a town once home to her father and that she herself spent most of her life visiting on family trips from Paris. The result is a completely unconventional viewing experience, imbued with a synthesis of familiar reality and alien fantasy; at times as slow and inexplicable as a gallery installation, but never detached from genuine sentiment. There’s as much going on in Will and Mike’s relationship as any other great film about male friendship; Simpson just asks the viewer to search a little deeper for its signals. Same, too, for June and Taylor, who are more solitary than Will and Mike, but no less charged with the everyday concerns and feelings that proves one is alive. June’s skatepark crush makes a video of his best (and worst) tricks, her face a blank slate that effortlessly projects our own feelings as we watch it with her. Taylor, the tragic loner, conveys life’s hardships in the tilt of his head, the dart of his eyes, and a few bites of ham and grits given by a stranger.

Simpson’s film was produced as a part of Omnes Films, a collective of filmmakers currently setting the example for truly independent cinema, particularly as it pertains to America. Those familiar with Omnes Films’ work will notice an intimate kinship between No Sleep Till and the films of Tyler Taormina, one of its members. Broadly, all his films are about nostalgic specters, and the wavering strength of community bonds — be they middle school friends, anonymous suburban neighbors, or intimate family relations. But they’re also about gesture, contained feeling, and our innate desire to search, be that within or outside of oneself. No Sleep Till arrives at roughly the same time as an onslaught of new Omnes Films productions, including Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Carson Lund’s Eephus, and Lorena Alvarado’s Venezuelan-set Lost Chapters. As the independent film industry seems prepared for its own impending disaster, No Sleep Till is an instructive guide in how we might respond. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Blue Sun Palace

“Long heralded as the harbinger of snore-inducing boredom, slow cinema, in actuality, is a somewhat paradoxical replica of what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions.” Gunning coined this term to celebrate the non-narrative pleasures of cinema pre-1906 that audiences from all parts of the world enjoyed; he lauded the trick films of Georges Méliès and the actualities of the Lumière Brothers as a form of “exhibitionist cinema [that] directly solicits spectator attention [by] inciting visual curiosity and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself.” Slow cinema is, of course, not that. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: a cinema of subtractions that…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — DHRUV GOYAL

Invention

“About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas are as powerful as the products we can turn them into. It’s a cynical line, perhaps, or maybe just realistic. But it’s also an obvious assessment of the state of the world, one particularly pronounced in the rarified air of Locarno, where the film recently enjoyed its world premiere. In such a place, abounding with films absolutely full of ideas but short of traditional commercial appeal, the question of the horrors our ideas can be turned into is at once gravely important and embarrassingly superfluous…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Two Times Joao Liberada

The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism, unintended anachronism, and predictable plot beats. Perhaps most insidiously, films that purport to tell the “true story” of deceased individuals’ lives risk flattening complex and contradictory individuals into two-dimensional symbols of triumph or tragedy. These artistic and ethical traps are amplified when a film aims to depict marginalized peoples; our reflexive condescension toward the past can blend noxiously with a prurient gaze on the suffering of the oppressed.

In her film Two Times João Liberada, director Paula Tomás Marques critiques these tendencies to warp historical figures for contemporary cinematic entertainment. The film follows the production of a Portuguese historical drama about João Liberada, a (fictional) gender-nonconforming target of the Spanish Inquisition, from the perspective of the film’s leading actress, a transgender woman named João (June João). João clashes with the director (André Tecedeiro), a cisgender man whose interest in Liberada lies exclusively in the suffering she endures, while João is more interested in the moments of hope, resilience, and human connection Liberada may have found amidst strife. As the film’s troubled production progresses, signs begin to emerge that the spirit of Liberada herself may be interfering with the attempt to represent her life onscreen.

Marques gives her film a loose narrative structure, which follows the slowly escalating conflict between João and director Diogo as João’s doubts about the film grow, and culminates in an act of supernatural intervention. The plot, though, functions mainly as a vehicle for Marques and June João — who co-wrote the screenplay in addition to starring in the film — to assay the implications of depicting long-dead queer and trans people, necessarily without their consent, from a 21st-century perspective. The critique largely focuses on the cisgender director’s usage of both Liberada and João as props for his own voyeuristic artistic project, with one particularly cutting scene of Diogo repeatedly demanding that João stay underwater longer as she rehearses a drowning scene, barely letting her come up for air; but João’s own role in presenting a skewed narrative also comes under critique. Musing on the possibility of her own image being manipulated after her death, as she has done to Liberada, João muses in voiceover in the film’s final scene: “I also hope to be a ghost haunting you all.”

While Marques’ narrative approach is multilayered, her aesthetic approach is spare, though frequently striking. The 16mm photography, shot by Mafalda Fresco, is textured and appealing, with simple techniques — double exposure to create ghosts in the frame, for instance — deployed to pleasingly uncanny effect. Where the film falters, however, is in narrative propulsion and emotional involvement: with the story and characterizations acting as more of a vehicle for ideas, Marques does not provide much room for engagement beyond the aesthetic or the intellectual, which is problematic insofar as that the film does seem to ask us to invest in João’s conflicted, emotionally challenging experience on set. The performance style of the entire cast, too, is cerebral and reserved, again encouraging intellectual engagement over emotional identification. Two Times João Liberada, then, is mostly effective as a thought experiment, though one that is at least an inventive and generative one, raising pertinent questions about the complications of representing real lives in fictional mediums, within its own clever metafictional frame. — ROBERT STINNER

Drowning Dry

“Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed promise, but became a bit exhausting since it seemed that the director had one single idea — rage as a substitute for mourning — and was satisfied to present various representations of that idea, with the same characters, over and over. It didn’t seem to move. With Drowning Dry, Bareiša has definitely crafted a plot that goes places. But the film suggests a formal discrepancy between the script and its realization. Structured…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Height of the Coconut Trees

One of the harshest realities in life is a lack of closure. The sudden death of a loved one, the dissolution of a serious relationship, the disappearance of a wedding ring; whatever the case may be, the universe frequently hands us improbable and unknowable scenarios without the benefit of an assumed outcome. It’s a cruel and unforgiving actuality inextricably linked to all of existence, and it also forms the foundation of The Height of the Coconut Trees, a new film by Chinese filmmaker Du Jie. Nominally a cinematographer, and arguably best known for lensing Sicheng Chen’s Detective Chinatown trilogy, Du makes his directorial debut here, while donning several other hats in writing, producing, editing, shooting, and production designing as well. Operating in a similar mode as South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, Du likewise opts to explore the profundities of life, death, relationships, and ghosts, delivering a deliberately staged and beautifully crafted meditation on the world’s greatest mysteries.

The core narrative of Coconut Trees revolves around two separate couples. The first is Sugamoto (Minami Ohba) and Aoki (Seita Shibuya), who are introduced in the throes of passion, forming a pact to commemorate their love for each other with matching tattoos. This sequence, which is the warmest and most intimate in the entire film, is also the last time either of them will be happy. While cleaning a fish at his restaurant, Aoki discovers a wedding ring lodged in its belly, using the golden opportunity to propose to Sugamoto. As they plan for their honeymoon, Aoki abruptly breaks up with Sugamoto, leaving the wounded woman to head off on holiday alone. The other couple here is Mochida (Soichiro Tanaka) and Rin (Riria Kojima), the latter of whom having recently committed suicide, leaving behind a roll of undeveloped photos and a litany of unanswered questions. Hoping to chase and capture an image of Rin’s ghost on film, Mochida travels to Cape Ashizuri, the southernmost point of Japan’s Shikoku Island and the very same location intended for Sugamoto and Aoki’s honeymoon. Elsewhere, another man bides his time at the beach, having lost his wedding ring in the sand while playing with his daughter, and as a result has been forbidden to return home by his own wife until he finds it again.

There’s a haunted feeling that permeates Coconut Trees, traversing back and forth through time to explore this microcosmic collection of lost souls, unceremoniously abandoned by their respective partners. The ensuing journey is akin to a quiet reckoning, finding Sugamoto and Mochida looking to pick up the pieces of their lives and comprehend why the vicissitudes of life have struck them fast and hard. For a first feature, Du’s formal approach is understated but assured, calling upon his own experience as a cinematographer for lovely, painterly compositions, even demonstrating the confidence to stage the film’s centerpiece as a quiet, extended dinner sequence between Sugamoto and Mochida, who eventually meet and share respective stories of their former loved ones in Cape Ashizuri.

The closing credits of Coconut Trees inform us that several of the film’s dialogue scenes were a reenactment of a talk event that took place during “Sazanami,” a Japan-China contemporary artist relay. This particular talk event was an exhibition by Kenji Chiba, who shared written excerpts and images from his art book, Hijack Geni, all based on real events. Chiba actually appears in the film, and Mochida attends one of his presentations, witnessing a shared collection of the final moments and memories of dying and suicidal people, hoping the experiences of others can bring him one step closer to closure. The Height of the Coconut Trees is enigmatic and elliptical — the title referring to the unknown stature of a pair of coconut trees that are planted outside of Sugamoto’s hotel in Cape Ashizuri — but it’s delivered with utmost confidence and beauty by Du, who makes an impressive feature debut rife with truths that speak a universal language. — JAKE TROPILA

The Village Next to Paradise

“In Western countries, the dailiness in those “lesser developed” ones has long been abstracted by a dearth of artistic and cultural diffusion from one to the next. This has, in part, created a certain impressionistic distance from those living oceans apart, one transported by the communications of nonprofits and conventional media; one that has often functioned in harmony with military campaigns and foreign affairs that have reduced the deaths of innocent people to the disembodied “collateral damage,” which has for so long minimized calamity in a soothing, passive voice…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — CONOR TRUAX

Sad Jokes

“As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts them, to varying degrees, in his sophomore feature, Sad Jokes. Stumm plays Joseph, a filmmaker in the development trenches for his next film, who copes with the challenges of co-parenting his son, Pino (portrayed by his real-life son, Justus Meyer), with his best friend Sonya (Haley Louise Jones) who has returned prematurely from a stint at a mental health clinic. Across two films now, Stumm has assembled something of a stock company who inject his cool, antiseptic vision of contemporary Berlin with genuine warmth. This convergence of opposites…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Kyuka Before Summer’s End

The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel. Like the members of the idiosyncratic family at its center, the film itself chafes against custom. Its depiction of the awkward, inevitable clash of economic and social strata is simultaneous to the breakdown of filmic conventions.

Narratively, these themes are wrapped up in the potential reunion between twin siblings and the mother who walked out of their lives; though the siblings, Konstantinos and Elsa, have no idea the reunion is meant to take place before the end of their trip, nor that their father, Babis, reluctantly coordinated it. The result is a film in which nothing really happens until everything happens, a sense of anticipation that’s hinted toward in its own title.

Konstantinos Goeorgopoulos and Elsa Lekakou play the twins, named after themselves. Their chemistry is immediately apparent, though that’s no surprise; they both starred in Kioku Before Summer Comes, Charamountanis’ short film that serves as this feature’s origin and whose home video-style footage makes an appearance. They have as much chemistry between themselves as they do with Charamountanis’ camera, which acts as a privileged window into their cosmically connected souls, completely at home in their presence, and in tune with their movements. Whether they fight over a snack in the film’s opening scene or, later, synchronize ballet positions on the deck of their father’s sail boat, Konstantinos and Elsa’s uninhibited, physical intuition is the beating heart of Kyuka.

Babis, on the other hand, sublimates his emotional repression into an intense passion for fishing, which he tries, unsuccessfully, to share with his children. After losing a catch late in the film, when his festering resentment over his poor fishing skills and his general lot in life is at its most volatile, all he can do is punch the ocean. Except for a subtle, almost submarine, homophobia directed at his evidently queer son, Babis has very few weapons in his arsenal with which to reign in the only things over which he has any semblance of control — his children.

Kyuka’s photography bears all the sumptuous texture you would expect of a film of its kind. The square frame’s rounded corners evoke a home-movie aesthetic,  filled with dappled sunlight bouncing off gleaming sheets of water and half-naked bodies. It’s a film about appearances as much as anything, the whole trip itself a test of Babis’ capabilities as a single father as the reunion with the estranged mother of his children bears down on him.

Of course, appearances aren’t as they seem. Babis meets with the mother of his children in secret on the first day of the holiday. His long walk from the dock to their meeting place — disorientingly stitched together from three different angles from a moving car: a tracking shot and gradual approaches from in front and behind — is the first of several instances in which Charamountanis’ interference with the solidity of the film’s construction communicates Babis’ frayed emotional state.

The estranged mother turns out to be an elegant woman Konstantinos and Elsa had met earlier that day at a bus stop. We don’t know if she recognized the friendly teens as her own children, but if she did, she doesn’t tell Babis when they come face to face. To give that away would be an announcement of her anxiety over the reunion, of her deep longing to see them; easy ammunition for Babis, with whom she still shares lingering resentments and petty insults about how they’ve aged in the intervening years.

Except for dinner, which every evening is a pathetic, tiresome helping of Babis’ catch of the day, the kids largely fend for themselves. That freedom is metered, however. Even Konstantinos, as feely expressive as he seems — he makes a cock joke in front of Babis while fishing with bait made from cock worms — is still obliged to conceal parts of himself. After spending the day with a young girl and her young mother (who we later learn, crucially, is actually her older half-sister), Babis forces Konstantinos to scratch off the polish the girl messily but lovingly painted on his nails that afternoon.

Kyuka always feels like it’s on a collision course with something. One assumes that would be the reunion between Konstantinos, Elsa, and their mother, but Charamountanis has something else planned. As the state of Babis’ insecurity becomes untenable, and as a new friend challenges his pathetic, though sympathetic, attempts to seem higher up in the world than he is, the film also breaks down. Earlier quirks of editing continuity transform into explicit tools of disorientation; separate rants become a single, incoherent argument over the origin of a meal; the grasp Babis still has on the bonds of his family becomes even more tenuous just as individual frames seem unable to adhere to the ones before and after them. Scenes play in reverse order, sometimes simultaneously with others. In Kyuka, Charamountanis has found an outlet to explore concealed intentions and unbeknownst identities that wrest, rather than repair, the bonds of a family unit.  — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Holy Electricity

“Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities of Levan Akin’s And Then we Danced and his more recent Crossing are a far cry from Lea Kulumbegashbili’s harrowing Beginning, for example. Alexandre Koberidze’s whimsical What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, whose magical shadings against urban life’s mundane alienation are baked into its foundations, seems in yet another world entirely. Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity’s brief flashes of eccentricity are less effective and call more attention to themselves than does Koberidze’s film, but…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Familiar Touch

Anyone who has spent time with someone suffering from dementia has seen a loved one lie to them. These are not lies of malice; they are lies of convenience. Trying to tell someone whose brain neurons are dying why they are where they are and why you are doing what you are doing is a difficult task made all the more frustrating by the fact that the dementia patient won’t remember. Isn’t it just easier to say something that will put their mind at ease and allow everyone to move on unbothered?

The frequency, ease and acceptance with which people lie to dementia sufferers makes them perhaps the most dehumanized members of our society, so perhaps it is not surprising that it has taken until now that a film, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, as promising a debut as the American cinema has given us in many years, reckons with the disease’s parallel atrophies — of the memory of one party on one hand, and of the humanity of those around them on the other.

For ethical reasons, nobody receiving living assistance for dementia appears in the fictional Familiar Touch, but Friedland, who worked for a time caring for artists with dementia, shot much of the film in a Pasadena, California, facility and worked closely with staff and patients during production. At the start of the film, we meet Ruth (venerable stage actress Kathleen Chalfant), home alone and preparing lunch in Friedland’s thoughtfully lit compositions. But when a man we eventually discern is her son comes to visit, we quickly see that Ruth’s facilities are leaving her (particularly when she fails to recall the name of her son, Steve). Benjamin’s performance is intentionally stilted, even mechanical, and Friedland wisely relegates him to a disembodied voice for a good chunk of the encounter, a decision that both dehumanizes and empowers him. When he lies to Ruth about where they are going and takes her to the assisted living facility, Friedland loosens her grip slightly: we get a moment to watch Ruth, incapable of understanding, talk to Steve and a nurse, and it’s immediately apparent why Steve took the approach he did.

Most of the rest of the film takes place in the facility and documents Ruth’s efforts to adapt. She can’t distinguish the dining hall from a restaurant, but later she takes control of the kitchen and we see that the years spent working in food have imprinted a comfort and excellence in the environment that has you wondering if she’s well enough to be a worker rather than a patient. Elsewhere, she can’t quite understand why she must talk to a doctor, and her insistence on reciting a borscht recipe from memory, impressive as it is, only underscores the necessity of treatment. Still, the performances, naturalistically capturing the performance of the nurses and the varying mental states of the patients, make this a more hospitable home than even what opened the film, even with Friedland’s attuned inserts of the everyday.

This tension, between the frequently necessary infringements on individual freedom and the social harm of continued autonomy, animates this middle section of Familiar Touch in a remarkably even-keeled manner — disciplined in the recognition of how framing, performance, and scenario color tone, but languid, even effortless, in appearance. Compelling subject matter aside, Familiar Touch astounds also for how Friedland, alongside DP Gabe Elder and editors Kate Abernathy and Aacharee Ungsriwong (who edited on 2016’s underseen By The Time It Gets Dark) make each shot feel like part of a carefully storyboarded sequence (whether or not that is the case). Much of the American independent cinema of the last two decades can trace its lineage to Cassavetes, but Familiar Touch is on its own track.

As the film approaches its dramatic and then emotional climax, it refines rather than underlines, complicating its lucid humanity where a lesser film would opt to repeat its points or litigate its themes within the drama itself. Crucial to the dehumanization of the dementia-addled, however, is the prescriptive manner in which they are discussed and treated, the generalization of how the disease manifests in different patients, and the rush with which society attempts to move the difficulties out of sight. Familiar Touch challenges us not to look away, and it does so — precisely because it embraces rather than rejects the complexity and nuance generally denied its subject — with the moral right that more explicitly political films can only aspire to. — FORREST CARDAMENIS