Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and frosty reaches of Eastern Russia has been slowly but surely building a robust regional cinema separate from the Russian film…
Caleb Michael Johnson’s sophomore feature amounts to little more than a clumsy attempt at intellectual horror. We open on a shot of a dog’s wagging tongue, while cozy French lounge pop plays in the background. Then, we cut to a supermarket where a woman…
There is No Evil is frequently, starkly poignant, but it’s successes are somewhat mitigated by a lack of culminating cohesion. Mohammad Rasoulof wasn’t present at last year’s award ceremony honoring There Is No Evil with Berlinale’s highest prize The Golden Bear. For the press conference,…
A chandelier swings in the gloom, tremulous strings kick in and tension mounts as the camera pulls in. The glinting fixture rocks back and forth through the inky blackness. It is untethered, its branching arms look skeletal, almost otherworldly, and just as the score…
Stowaway suffers from a contrived script and poor character-building, but works considerably better when maximizing its budget in service of action spectacle. A three-person mission to Mars, one in which every detail down to the grammage of coffee mugs has been accounted for, discovers…
Slalom is a raw and unpretentious study of trauma and the ways in which young women can wrest back control of their own course. The slalom belongs to a group of Olympic events whose competition is built around the descent. Unlike a sport like…
One of last year’s standouts, Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, traced the trajectory of a writer from his idealistic roots towards a solipsistic cynicism at the end of his career. In fellow Italian countryman Fabrizio Ferraro’s narrative feature The Luminous View, we find a similarly…
Some Kind of Heaven finds legitimate pathos within the oddball trappings of a would-be utopian retirement community. From the cold and gloomy vantage of New York’s post-pandemic winter, a chance to escape into a sunny, pre-Covid Florida sure sounds tempting. Watching Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind…
