The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician, tends to reconstruct rather than document, reincorporating tokens of his beloved ’60s and beyond into parallel narratives, as in…
In Ste. Anne, Rhayne Vermette strives to imbue narrative filmmaking with as much tangible texture as possible, even if that means freely disrupting said narrative while still maintaining a semblance of a linear progression. Even in its most ostensibly, diegetically realist passages, the chronicle…
The Coens excel in films that flaunt a superficial mastery of genre, form, and cinematic grammar, all to arrive at intentionally depleted and exhausted conclusions. Projects either end up in absolute infernos (Barton Fink), or coil themselves so tightly they shatter into giddy cynicism…
Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn, as he’s even quoted as conceding that the 1981 film could withstand and even encourage such a reading. But…
Who You Think I Am attempts to speak to our current Internet age, but mines only shallowly with its picked-over storytelling mode. Juliette Binoche, for nearly her entire career, has juggled a specific experiment in actorly debasement and a more conventional luminescence that clinches her…
A supreme sculptor of the effects of spiritual and physical isolation, Abel Ferrara has made a good number of films that comment on our “current moment” well before the current “current moment” was truly upon us. 2012’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth narrated the…
Lacking much in the way of an explored thesis, The Viewing Booth only musters the power of a gimmick. Talking about the patent-pending Interrotron in a 2004 issue of FLM Magazine, documentarian Errol Morris touts his teleprompter-inspired camera appendage as a tool that “creates greater distance…
Delmer Daves has his deserved champions, but even so, he’s an interesting sell; not a hard one, per se, but one that’s mildly inundated with caveats and hesitant admissions. Kent Jones aptly touted Daves’ directorial penchant for goodness, benevolence of all kinds, which implies…
The Tsugua Diaries would be considered quite the swing for most any other director, but for Miguel Gomes, here partnered with documentarian and collaborator Maureen Fazendeiro, it’s a relatively low-key effort, a “romp” even for a director whose last outing was a massive, three-part…
A film of casually assured artistry and superficial topicality, Noémie Merlant’s feature debut Mi Iubita, Mon Amour is something of an archetypal French festival entry, albeit one that occasionally transcends its foundational triteness. Merlant, who also stars, balances the remarkable self-possession she maintained in…
