Overly reliant on metaphorical contrivance and signaled emotionality, Babyteeth fails to transcend its archetypal narrative. An unadorned tale of woe, grief, angst, love, mortality, and familial hardship, Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth struggles to create any sense of cohesiveness in either theme or narrative through-line. Haphazardly…
In considering the artistic decay posed within the persisting practice of archetypal expository documentary, Your Face represents a confrontation with history and convention, here mapped in the contours and minute expressions playing out across a variety of people. A selection of 12 faces interact…
by Zachary Goldkind Film Retrospective
What Time is It There? & The Skywalk is Gone | Tsai Ming-liang
Inspired by the mournful reverie found in observations of Lee Kang-Sheng, inundated by grief at the loss of his father , Tsai Ming-liang crafted an ethereal ghost-story, constructed of a gently absurd trajectory towards total disassociation. This development would lead to the dual perspective…
Prior to the solidification of Tsai Ming-liang’s career, which is arguably realized with his first Lee Kang-Sheng collaboration (in the television commissioned project Boys), there was Li Hsiang’s Love Line, a rather frugal yet quietly evocative film which offers an intriguing relationship explicated through…
Balagov’s debut proves a heady look at individualism, but one ultimately less substantive than it initially suggests. Tribal frictions unfurl, both combative and internalized, when a young Jewish couple is abducted in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, a space in which resides a plethora of cultural…
A spectral trilogy concludes under refracted conditions in Christian Petzold’s diagnostic landscape of 20th Century anxieties, which actualizes the magical realist gestures methodically peppered throughout his last two projects, Phoenix and Transit. This development has evinced the increased crystallization of a certain kind of…
An elegiac stillness envelops the population of a coastal town, the death of one of their own evoking a history where the laden myths of sea monsters find agency over their livelihoods. Civilians become the ghosts they mourn, the film rendering them an amalgam…
