Born to Be tackles important subject matter but too often treats the individuals at its heart as subjects rather than partners in the documentary’s creation. Born to Be, directed by Tania Cypriano, takes as its subject New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and the multitude of…
Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa‘s latest piece of archival “found footage” cinema would appear to have been taken straight from television. Edited together are a dozen or more red carpets from the Gala evenings organized by the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier during the…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that renders the line between real and artificial indistinct. Titled as it is — Family Romance LLC, after the company — the film plays out…
**What follows is the inaugural KtC entry for the recently added 1950s canon. Make sure to check out all of the 1950s inclusions (and the rest of the canon in its current entirety). Minnelli’s melodramas, always receding behind his much more popular musicals and…
Kelly Reichardt’s latest treads familiar thematic territory, but her minimalist leanings here lend toward something altogether more expansive. First Cow is a film of beginnings and endings — and, thusly, also of returns. Kelly Reichardt‘s second period film marks the return of the 4:3…
Heimat Is a Space in Time is a film of palpable gravity but one that may always be more meaningful to Heise than to audiences. Heimat Is a Space in Time is an assemblage film in the truest sense, one constructed as an archaeological process that came…
In the age of mass production, art is nothing unique. And in the 1960s, the work of Andy Warhol became one of the foremost indicators of this new shift in cultural understanding. Reflected in his work is an increasing disassociation from modernist ideals and…
Orphea is as scattershot a film as one would expect from the unlikely artistic duo of Alexander Kluge and Khavn De La Cruz. The two first collaborated with the 2018 quasi-documentary Happy Lamento and have returned to breathe new life into the myth of…
Bonello’s attempt to meld cultural commentary with a historical consideration of colonialist sins is lost amid a commitment to tension-building. Voodoo, as represented in Zombi Child, is a religion of opposing functions that ties together life and death in a volatile form of spirituality, though…
Synonyms is a film driven by an idea, one that rattles around in its protagonist’s head and belabors him at every step. The question is one of personhood and its creation through language — whether one’s nationality is something malleable or, at most, a lie…
