In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve long marked the spot where a dead body was buried, such that mourning can become a location-based task — one goes to where…

Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And if we assume this experiment was begun by a set of optimistic scientists — fortunate enough to have acquired…

With his latest feature, director Robert Schwentke has moved away from his Time Traveler’s Wife, Divergent, Snake Eyes-days of bad blockbuster filmmaking. Seneca — On the Creation of Earthquakes is roughly as audience-unfriendly as films come, sometimes to its benefit, but mostly otherwise. For proof, simply start with…

A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down to kiss her; she closes her eyes, waiting for his lips. The Kiss: an allegory of love, reproduced from poster to pencil case…

Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A story that engages throughout, only to falter in its resolution, will often be duly lamented; a novel that picks apart the conventions it adapts…

“Something that starts soon and looks good.” “Okay, so what’s the plot?” Anybody who has ever recommended any work of fiction has surely been hit with this question, likely quite immediately following one of their suggestions. It’s a fair inquiry, too: most people who engage with art need…

Since the release of his first short film, Heroes Never Die, 35 years ago, Alain Guiraudie has gradually built a reputation as one of world cinema’s most interesting, idiosyncratic talents. In 2001, he released two medium-length films, Sunshine for the Poor and That Old Dream That Moves, the…

As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel room, dollar bills on the floor, the blinds closed; not asleep, though, but just lying in the dark; brooding; ready to get up…

Desert of Namibia At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after the growing yet too-belated canonization of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 classic. In these films, beautiful yet disaffected youths stumble through romantic hardships in a…

In a landscape crowded with thrillers about obsession and celebrity, Jimmy Warden’s Borderline tries to carve out its own space, mixing ‘90s nostalgia, dark humor, and psychological tension into a chaotic night of pop-infused terror. At the center is Sofia (Samara Weaving), a music idol whose fame catches…

Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from 10 years ago. There are many reasons not to revive the project, as the film’s former lead Jiang Chen (Qin Hao) points out. An…

Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors, including Peter Riegert. Riegert went from losing a role in Silver’s Between the Lines, to a supporting role in Chilly Scenes of Winter, and…

Suspended Time Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been deemed “minor.” It’s true, Suspended Time is resolutely, even defiantly, small-scaled, a time capsule of a very recent past that people…

In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to be, despite her commitment to her work (here shown taking pictures of newlyweds), somewhat troubled and melancholic. Specifically, there’s the sense of inner…

The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and Lena (Josefa Heinsius), acclimate themselves to speaking in each other’s native languages over the course of the film, yet as their relationship deepens,…

Someone inside one of the UK’s intelligence agencies has stolen a device that could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and sold it to the enemy, but that’s of almost secondary concern to all the bed-hopping and backstabbing between romantic partners in Steven Soderbergh’s…

There have been many movies about baseball, that most American of sports — it is axiomatic. They can be nostalgic, romantic, or even, increasingly, tech-inflected (aka Moneyball, stats, archiving via aggregate). It’s fitting that America’s Pastime would reflect changes in the socio-political landscape of the country; sports have…

Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France; The Tempest in Sycorax. Of course, these are not straightforward adaptations, and Piñeiro uses these plays instead…

Henry Fonda for President Thoughtful film curation asks us to consider films in a new light. Alexander Horwath knows this better than most, having served as director of the Vienna International Film Festival and the Austrian Film Museum during the last thirty-plus years. His Henry Fonda for President,…

In the Mouth In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to a surreal buddy comedy to a sentimental drama. It follows the hermetic Merl (Colin Burgess), a young man who refuses…

Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with its black-and-white photography and consciously naturalistic dialogue, the film is a throwback to another era, a time (perhaps the last) when filmmakers could…