She Paradise abandons the physicality at its core for an unfortunate bit of dubious messaging. Lost in the anonymous aesthetic swarm that is digital, independent filmmaking, She Paradise, directed by Maya Cozier, oscillates between trope and something more benevolent, before abruptly undercutting its quiet subterfuge…
Dangerous is content to ride its plateaued production structure of cribbed parts to the territory of who cares. When speaking of Dangerous, it’s difficult to not make the most immediate Die Hard reference when the film, itself, seems comfortable enough luxuriating in that very pastiche. Like…
It seems fair to suggest that The Forgotten Ones is a film for the Western Jews, communities of the diaspora, a collective lost to the Zionist campaign that has raged for decades. But, it’s not a work that forces them to contend with these internalizations of…
Gaza Mon Amour finds inspirations in canonical “Mon Amour” films, but takes care to emphasize the present moment and the wya images ferment under occupation. Arab and Tarzan Nasser’s finely-crafted romance, Gaza Mon Amour, invokes the sensibilities of a fairy tale as a means to…
Diaz‘s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian exploitation. Lahi, Hayop…
Maxwell McCabe-Lokos’ Stanleyville confines itself to a single room, a kind-of auditorium space that could be found among your local long-term care facilities. Barren, disheveled, and ultimately anonymous, the environment articulates rather bluntly the film’s formal and aesthetic qualities; it’s this room, and the…
Emblematic of kitchen-sink realism, Jesse Dvorak’s feature debut is a paradigmatic unfurling of anticipated beats and narrativity. Baby, Don’t Cry, written by and starring Zita Bai as our titular protagonist, vacillates through Washington State’s rural flats and the intimacy of a burgeoning relationship with…
Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing burrows her contemplative sensibility into the archiving of a contemporary reality. On the fiction end of the work, if it can be called fictitious, we glean ephemeral insights into…
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…