In his Metaphors on Vision, Stan Brakhage once called for us to “imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word’,” and the jittery intensity we often associate with his films has worked to elaborate on that ideal. Despite differing vastly in both form…
How does one give shape to one’s experience, one’s grief? The question persists through the films of Canadian director Sofia Bohdanowicz, though it takes most literal form in her latest short, Point and Line to Plane, titled after the influential 1926 art theory text…
Garrett Bradley opts for vague generality rather than the specific and personal, robbing Time of some of its implicit power. From the western to the road movie, the legacy of the climactic homecoming looms large in American cinema, which is everywhere peopled by vagrants and…
A late-blooming filmmaker with admirably catholic interests, increasingly Catholic tendencies, and a rather revanchist reputation, Eugène Green, not unlike Éric Rohmer before him, is concerned with questions of modernity. Following a lilting prefatory journey from bustling tourist center to bucolic Basque country, his latest,…
by Lawrence Garcia Film
There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse | Nicolás Zukerfeld
The second chapter of Argentine director Nicolás Zukerfeld’s hour-long cine-essay, There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse, is a fleet, funny, and inventive piece of work. Narrated largely against a black screen, with only the occasional textual annotation…
Fauna, Mexican-Canadian director Nicolás Pereda’s ninth feature, begins with that most familiar of low-budget indie-film setups: a pair of artists (actors in this case), Paco (Francisco Barreiro) and Luisa (Luisa Pardo), take to the road together for a weekend trip. But the film soon…
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 to the crime-thriller key of René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960) — a fairly intriguing proposition in itself. When…
Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip assessment of a film that takes to the fringes of American life: Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction work of the same…
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, the film was shot over three years on the borders between Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria,…
What would society look like if amnesia occurred with the frequency, unpredictability, and suddenness of something like a car accident? This is the high-concept starting point of Greek director Christos Nikou’s debut feature Apples, which unfolds in an Athens where ambulances are routinely called…
