Between Dog and Wolf In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are left to deduce the time and place on the basis of some scattered memorabilia, and the age of the…
SXSW Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 5: The Spine of Night, Sound of Violence, Violet
The Spine of Night The Spine of Night is a whole lot of movie. Despite the film’s relatively straightforward fantasy logline — sorcerer goes mad with power, attempts to take over and/or destroy the world, unassuming hero saves the day — both its narrative…
SXSW Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 4: Fucking with Nobody, Witch Hunt, Jakob’s Wife
Fucking with Nobody For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a filmmaker who, after losing a project to her nemesis Kristian, gets involved in a fake Instagram catfishing scheme with…
SXSW Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 3: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, The Feast, Here Before
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched In 2012, writer and film programmer Kier-La Janisse published House of Psychotic Women, a tremendous and essential text, part autobiography, part confessional, part film-guide roadmap to decades of cinematic depictions of female trauma, desire, and death. It’s one of…
SXSW Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 2: Gaia, Broadcast Signal Intrusion, The End of Us
Gaia There’s an ancient, malevolent force living in the depths of the forest in director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia, a psychedelic bit of eco-horror that finds nature taking over and transforming the human body in hideous ways. Forest Rangers Gabi (Monique Rockman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi)…
SXSW Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 1: Films We’ve Already Covered
After being forced to cancel 2020’s festival in the eleventh hour in the wake of Covid’s proliferation across the U.S., SXSW returns in 2021. Adopting the virtual format — even after Gov. Greg Abbott’s most recent act of idiocy (which, honestly, probably isn’t the…
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2021 — Dispatch 2: Lovers, Red Soil, Summer of 85
Lovers A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering amidst an especially weak lineup at Venice, and receiving an almost-unanimously negative response, her much-maligned latest originally bore the…
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2021 — Dispatch 1: Love Affair(s), Margaux Hartmann, Mandibles
Love Affair(s) Like several films in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema lineup, Love Affair(s) is a title that was meant to premiere at Cannes 2020, under “The Newcomers” banner (meant to highlight directors of note making their Cannes debuts). Also like other Rendez-Vous offerings,…
Berlin Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 7: Petite Maman, Fabian — To the Dogs, Language Lessons
Petite Maman Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed on a precipice of some essential awareness, riding the ebbs and flows of emerging self-knowledge, and arriving at necessarily unsettled places. Specifically, her films explore that bardo between childhood and adulthood — often, but not always…
Berlin Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 6: Bloodsuckers, A Cop Movie, Memory Box
Bloodsuckers In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori — whose existence in Byron’s mansion resembled something more like an in-house drug dealer than a typical country doctor…