Every pronouncement that points to a Second Coming ruptures the human sense of linear temporal experience, pulling one out of the unending succession of days epitomized by Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. In the Pacific War in the Philippines, the most famous…
Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally, an insular film. Set almost entirely on the island of Fårö, where the legendary Swedish filmmaker lived and shot a number of his most celebrated features, it looks at a place that has become a focal point…
Summer of 85 is a weightless trifle, built on an unsophisticated narrative and featuring a patently ridiculous ending. The trailer for Summer of 85, the latest from Cannes perennial François Ozon, makes the film look something like Call Me By Your Name (2017) transposed…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as a “horizontal” story. Taken together, of course, the matter is quite different, and the resulting triptych has been described…
Gunda is an empty, exploitative aesthetic exercise that that has no ideas to speak of. If nothing else — and it truly offers little else — Viktor Kosakovskiy’s Gunda serves as a handy catalogue of contemporary film-festival affectation. Although it nominally concerns the lives of…
It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so often noted for his diptych structures, seems to have moved into a new triptych phase with his two latest films: The Woman Who Ran and now Introduction. Still, it does seem rather significant that both…
Like their previous collaboration, 2013’s The Strange Little Cat, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider is best approached as a Rube-Goldberg contraption of physical/emotional pressure build-ups and releases. But whereas that film was set almost entirely in a Berlin apartment over…
Un film dramatique is a well-intentioned study, but falls into something of a paternalistic trap in presentation. In general, films about childhood, pedagogy and learning present a tricky proposition for filmmakers — they tend to invite the adult’s tendency to condescend, idealize, infantilize, or…
True Mothers bears Kawase’s familiar textures and ambiance but is hampered by a few too many banal plot beats. Adapted from a 2015 bestseller by Mizuki Tsujimura, Naomi Kawase’s True Mothers is a melodrama rendered with an admirable textural specificity and a feel for the…
Notturno is at times oddly diffuse, but the harrowing brutality it captures bears undeniable power. The echoes of war reverberate throughout Notturno, a film of unnerving quietude that, as per its title, unfolds in something like a perpetual gloaming. Directed by Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi,…
