The playfulness of Chantal Akerman is, throughout her work, always nebulous. A smile, a laugh, a tall-standing stride: these do not signify transparent gestures, so much as the ephemera that coat the quotidian and make it beautiful, elusive, and singular. In her films and…
Iva Radivojević’s Aleph builds itself atop Jorge Luis Borges’ short story of the same name, rendering a small tale of infinity-seeking, a philosophical riff on the Whiteheadian theories that surround interconnectivity in what is commonly referred to as the “metaphysical realm.” The film follows…
Red Moon Tide offers impressive sonic and visual craft, but is somewhat undermined by its weaker narrative and character elements. An elegiac stillness envelops the population of a coastal town, the death of one of their own evoking a history where the laden myths…
We are asked: what of the implications of these encounters? What of the markings left by a history: markings that will elude the act of their initial etch? In Truong Minh-Quý’s follow-up to his debut feature The Tree House — a postcolonial science fiction…
You Will Die at Twenty contains plenty of allegorical power, but its ineffectual plotting ultimately teases out more stimulating questions than it does answers. As a motif in his film, Amjad Abu Alala enacts a small gesture, one intimately coupled to the narrative’s concerns: Muzamil,…
Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine thankfully manages to avoid status quo filmmaking but still feels somehow unfinished. There seems to be a popular, contemporary aesthetic that utilizes a retreat into narrative alienation, where the sum of static wides and a distanced…
Triggered is a derivative, generic horror flick populated by insufferable assholes. Pass. With a title like Triggered, one might be forgiven for expecting some kind of topical political content, subtextual or otherwise, especially given the horror genre’s long history of smuggling big ideas in between…
Girl is a deeply unremarkable, almost anonymous film that nonetheless testifies to the fascinating, untapped presence Bella Thorne offers. There isn’t real reason to brood much over Girl, a uniformly monotonous thriller which features broad strokes of anonymity that bleed into a kind of wishful…
Space Dogs finds directors Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter misty-eyed and looking up at the stars, convening mythologies surrounding the Space Race. But the filmmakers also take moments to look down — at the descendants of wolves running amok through the streets of Moscow,…
Arab and Tarzan Nasser’s finely-crafted romance, Gaza Mon Amour, invokes the sensibilities of a fairy tale as a means to cultivate grand gestures of sentimentality, aided by orchestral cues and sweeping wide shots — akin to the early romanticism of melodrama — and thus…
