Holler stumbles a bit on the way to its ending, but its strength of direction, character, and milieu make for an often thrilling bit of industrial indie cinema. There’s a scene about halfway through Nicole Riegel’s debut feature Holler where Ruth (Jessica Barden) and her…
The Amusement Park is a remarkable work and profound reminder of Romero’s facility with pointed critique. Long recognized as one of the absolute masters of horror, the subsumption of George A. Romero’s zombie iconography into the popular lexicon has, perhaps inevitably, gradually sanded off…
Chloe Galibert-Laine and Kevin B. Lee’s Bottled Songs 1-4 is an epistolary essay film in which the duo exchange four video letters, with each filmmaker authoring two segments apiece, that interrogate the audio/visual techniques of assorted terrorist propaganda videos, ranging from low res phone…
Akilla’s Escape is an unfortunate mishmash of cliché and amateurism, never quite clear what it wants to say or be. Akilla’s Escape begins with a long montage sequence of archival photos set to the pulsating vibes of Bob Marley & the Wailers’ “Punky Reggae…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the 1990s and would intermittently return to in the following decade. As explored elsewhere in our Retrospective series, German television was…
2018’s Transit followed two period pieces, each set in a specific era highly important to director Christian Petzold: Barbara, which unfolds in East Germany in the 1980s, and Phoenix, which takes place in the immediate wake of WWII in a rubble-strewn Berlin. The detailed,…
Caveat teases potential and boasts an impressive setup, but ultimately loses its thread after this initial stretch. One of the challenges of the modern horror film is creating a plausible enough reason for placing characters in potentially outlandish scenarios. When done successfully, it’s the…
Following his breakthrough film, The State I Am In, Christian Petzold returned to smaller-scale television production for his next project, 2001’s Something to Remind Me. Jaimey Fisher offers some pertinent details on the history of German television’s relationship with its national cinema, which is…
One of the great madcap poets of the American cinema, Alan Rudolph has seemingly slipped into irrelevance since his heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. If he’s mentioned at all in contemporary discourse, it’s usually to acknowledge his apprenticeship (of a sort) with Robert…
“Harun [Farocki] told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, [Night and Fog] was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents. They understood that…
