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…
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…
