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…
Each one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films is a series of echoes and recurrences, palimpsests of what has preceded and teasing forebears of what’s to follow. There are certain indicators to his career’s chronology — sly mention of current events, the obvious quality of the…
The Woman Who Ran continues Hong’s run of affecting personal exorcisms, here crafting a memorable protagonist who is equally mysterious and familiar. Hong Sang-soo’s excoriating relationship dramedies have evolved into personal — and disarmingly genteel — exorcisms in the last decade. The surface-level masculine brutishness…
The Real Thing isn’t without considerable flaws, but it still allows plenty to percolate across its behemoth runtime. The unspoken commonality of all the projects that find notions of TV vs. cinema foisted upon them is their duration. Not just the cumulative length of…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only if you choose to tease it out, as he’s otherwise content to foreground the immediate virtues of each film,…
Although The Flowers of St. Francis sits comfortably within one Roberto Rossellini’s most lauded creative stretches , it’s a work that still doesn’t exactly have a home in any of the three subcategories that have been parceled out from the director’s filmography: the neorealist…
Berlin Alexanderplatz fails to build to any climax that would justify its length, instead spinning out into infinity and confusing circuity for world-building. If Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz — one of the greatest pieces of modernist fiction produced during the 20th century,…
In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are left to deduce the time and place on the basis of some scattered memorabilia, and the age of the subjects. In the mountainous…
