“You say you’re under a curse – well so what? So’s the whole damn world.” In a darkened cave, miles away from Ashitaka’s home, a wandering monk/mercenary shares food with the young traveler before this exchange. For Ashitaka, a warrior-prince and the last scion…
Shadow in the Cloud holds some promise in its early genre goings, but the second half reveals an unfortunate dearth of ideas and charm. It’s never a great sign when a feature-length film begins by putting a lampshade on its own obvious antecedent. Case in…
Herself is a well-intentioned but ultimately one-note message film that fails to build any real power. A patron of the British arts, Phyllida Lloyd’s transition from a director of theater to film could hardly have been more conspicuous. Her debut feature, Mamma Mia, set box-office…
Pieces of a Woman showcases a bravura if ostentatious initial quarter, but it’s all downhill from there as the film devolves into mere misery porn tropes. Director Kornél Mundruczó knows how to open a film (see the otherwise underwhelming White God, for example), and with…
With The Midnight Sky, George Clooney the director strikes again, delivering a bland, ugly film that is tedious and void of any emotional poignancy. George Clooney might be an A-list actor, but at this point in his career, it seems safe to say that…
If those films inextricably linked to childhood experience — those movies, in Serge Daney’s words, “that watched us grow up and saw us… already entangled in the snare of our history” — are about the trouble with being born, Angela Schanelec’s I Was at Home,…
To delve into the world of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU. is to forgo the comfortable spectatorial positions of detachment and objectivity, and submit to its fantastical reconstruction of a totalitarian empire. Already, viewers versed in the megalomaniac dictatorships of auteurs and visionaries might balk; and that’s to…
“The Seattle Mariners are eminently lovable, profoundly human, and stunningly, outrageously weird.” These words come courtesy of Jon Bois, writer, editor, animator, producer, and director of the idiosyncratic and extraordinarily engaging The History of the Seattle Mariners. He’s describing its subject, but he might as…
What would it look like to adapt The Communist Manifesto to film? Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? Industrial Society and Its Future? These texts have no main characters to follow, no specific locations, and no visual action — they are texts anathema to a visual medium. So, when Verso…
The first 30 minutes of CoroNation, Ai Weiwei’s comprehensive snapshot of Wuhan, China in the earliest days of COVID-19’s global devastation, are among the most compelling put to screen this year. By focusing on ground-level human stories — in the opening moments, a couple trying…
