What is the difference between a filmmaker and a filmer? Watching archival films assembled from home movies, it’s difficult to escape the long shadow of Jonas Mekas — a man who did not view his work as artistic, but compelled by a “necessity” to move forward, to keep…
The premise is familiar: three young women spend their holiday by the sea, relaxing, flirting, and drinking; Jacques Rozier fertilizes this unremarkable narrative turf with a freewheeling spirit and melancholic edge in his second feature, Du Côté d’Orouët, premiering at 2024 FiDMarseille in a new 4K restoration. Made…
Actor-turned-director Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love opens with a philosophical debate. In a brown-toned home, inflected with ember and golden highlights, old friends discuss the question of romantic love. Children scream in the background, and wine is being spilled as they speak frankly and intimately about the…
Primarily set in a single, sparsely-dressed location and embracing archness and theatricality, Niclas Larsson’s Mother, Couch could be mistaken for being based on a stage play. The film, in actuality adapted from the novel Mamma I Soffa by Swedish author Jerker Virdborg, unpacks a contentious family dynamic set off by a…
Late in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winner, Harvey, the theme of the play is delivered by — who else? — a salty cab-driver. The aptly-named E.J. Lofgren starts his speech with characteristically regional bluster (“Listen, lady, I been drivin’ this route 15 years”) and details the changes he sees in…
Amusement Park There is a provocation inherent in the depiction of sex as sensation: shed the vows and the assurances of deep emotional connection, and all that remains is pure, pulsating libido. Such libidinal currents, placed before the camera’s eye, have caused offense on two diametrically opposed counts:…
One of the hallmarks of rapid-onset social change is a general sense of confusion. We often understand that some sort of intervention is absolutely necessary, but just as often we face the fact that we really don’t know what to do. What does productive resistance look like? What…
Richard LaGravenese’s (P.S. I Love You) new Netflix rom-com A Family Affair — which offers viewers an easy-sell reunion for A-listers Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron, 12 years after their last (and categorically different) on-screen collaboration in campfest The Paperboy — quite clearly intends to offer something of…
It’s incredibly rare in our super-connected, social media-fueled media ecosystem for a new film to arrive with no notice, no awareness of which to speak, and definitely no fanfare. But a couple of weeks ago word started to spread on Twitter about a straight-to-VOD action film starring a…
Read a review of any of Angela Schanelec’s feature films and you’re bound to encounter adjectives like “elliptical,” “confounding,” and “obscure.” It’s true — the German filmmaker has a peculiar approach to storytelling, favoring all manner of narrative obfuscation while honing in on movements, gestures, and that most…
As Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade, Last Summer scans initially as an altogether more mannered affair for the director. Known for her sexually frank inquiries into desire, taboo, and transgression, Breillat’s latest drops us into the upper-crust world of Parisian couple Anne (Léa Drucker) and Pierre…
The provocations of the Italian poet, critic, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini have been, for contemporary viewers, largely condensed into that one magnum opus of his: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, with its unerring plunge into depravity, also has the good fortune of being its maker’s…
A mother and daughter’s symbiotic bond fuels the artistic crucible that underlies Janet Planet. Such a description, let alone the title, might indicate a film that’s merely riding the coattails of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Fortunately, Annie Baker’s first foray into feature filmmaking is anything but derivative. The…
Jazzy Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of a trampoline, considering their impending adulthood and lamenting the endless griefs that come with age. After Jasmine, AKA Jazzy, fires off a…
To the uninitiated, techno music might feel forbiddingly sterile, lacking the warmth of familiar analog instruments or the collaborative dynamic of bandmates, songwriters, and producers. What’s more, the lone figure of the DJ, sequestered above and away from the dance floor, can seem both intimidatingly aloof and annoyingly…
It’s an awkward phase, that post-graduation purgatory where possibilities seem endless, endlessly limited, or both — or so I’m told, I never went to college myself — and the choice paralysis and more general anxiety that so often comes with navigating it provides a fairly convenient backdrop for…
From VR to AI and NFT, from Metaverse to cutting-edge computer games and interface technologies, it’s quite clear that both our existential and psychological states are so enormously affected that, perhaps, our entire perception of the world no longer has a stable baseline, but is instead locked into…
Nuked Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never outright feel dusty or outmoded, and, on the contrary, still hold a special place for many contemporary indie dramedies. Despite financial practicalities that…
The playful vignettes of various cheesemongers, makers, and even competition judges in Ian Cheney’s Shelf Life are much like the dairy product itself — each a little different, some more enticing than others, but all delightful in their own way. Much like Cheney’s last film, The Arc of…
Since 2011, animator and director Don Hertzfeldt has focused on one topic: memory. In the tripartite It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the loss of memory is equated with the loss of personhood or death itself; in the World of Tomorrow trilogy, memories of dead people are injected into…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because they inherently represent its ups and downs for those who uphold them. Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, raw with muted fury, venerated and castigated…