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,…
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,…
If there is any affinity to be found between Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, it’s in their shared ability to turn the economics of filmmaking to their advantage, to leverage each project into a veritably Situationist endeavor — or, in other words, to recognize…
Minari sets up opportunities for deep engagement, but it mostly forgoes those in favor a flattened series of simplistic, bittersweet vignettes as narrative. Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987), adapted from Marilynn Robinson’s novel of the same name, contains one of American cinema’s most marvelous, complexly portrayed…
There is potential potency to the character work in A Family Tour, but the flat direction renders nearly every scene frustratingly inert. There’s no shortage of justified anger in Ying Liang’s semi-autobiographical A Family Tour. In following up 2012’s When Night Falls, the film that…
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…
Nomadland‘s delicate attention to storytelling tradition unfortunately gives way to conventionality in the film’s back half, displacing its early promise. 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…
Clearly indebted to the stylings of Guy Maddin, The Twentieth Century unfortunately feels merely mannered rather than touched by any genuine madness. In the Canada of The Twentieth Century, Winnipeg director Matthew Rankin’s gonzo historical reimagining of the nation’s late 19th century history, disappointment reigns supreme.…
Collective is a compelling portrait of bureaucratic inertia and stasis and a rich study in the difficulties of actual progress. On October 30, 2015, a fire broke out in the Colectiv concert club in Bucharest, killing 27 on site. In the following months, another 37…
Mank is a listless, conventional story of embattled genius, safely told from behind a scrim of sentimentality. In her notorious New Yorker article “Raising Kane,” which essentially argued that screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz deserved full recognition for penning Citizen Kane (as opposed to sharing credit…
