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…
Miyamoto hopes to manifest the power of a pendulum hanging over one’s head — swaying, seeking a point of equilibrium. That pendulum is morality: At the core of director Tetsuya Mariko’s adaptation (there’s already been a Miyamoto manga and TV series) is a rape, but…
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 holds that line, focusing on a string of snowballing murders and intimidations. But the film also appears to find…
Forgiven Children is a reactionary apologist’s straw man, an irresponsible configuration of centrist thought which aestheticizes and generalizes any viewpoints that would be positioned in opposition to it. A young boy is murdered, and his murderer — another juvenile — goes free, the court…
Wonders in the Suburbans is an unwieldy affair, taking supposedly comedic pot-shots at any number of targets without any clear vision. Jeanne Balibar’s brand of idiosyncrasy — most recently and prominently displayed in Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara — curdles with her solo directorial debut, Wonders in…
