Huang Ji is among the last handful of Chinese directors to sneak through the portal distribution company dGenerate Films, the center of an important 2000s artistic nexus in Chinese cinema (also including Rotterdam & Locarno film festivals) that was able to facilitate an entry point for alternative and…
Brahmāstra Part One: Shiva is a soulless mega-franchise starter that does very little of interest with its massive budget. Chances are, you already know what you’re getting yourself into with Brahmāstra Part One: Shiva. How could you not? It’s so larger-than-life that you can’t not know about it;…
Master Gardener In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging at an otherwise reliable clip, especially this past decade. 2017’s First Reformed, something of a critical watershed, is the ostensible perfect result of…
It’s the pillowing warmth of nostalgia, which sporadically rears its head that it may provide orientation and affirm consciousness amidst historical chaos, that makes up the body of Antonio Lukich’s sophomore feature. Luxembourg, Luxembourg is a romantic ache in the tale of twins Kolya and Vasylii (Amil and…
When Robert Zemeckis set about making preparations for his adaptation of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol, he was immediately confronted with a potentially project-killing conundrum. This was back in 2013, almost a full decade after Zemeckis had made his first major foray into mo-cap-based, CG filmmaking with The…
In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if not prominence, then a certain level of respect for his next two films. Flight, in some ways, made sense: Denzel Washington being as…
“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.” — James Cameron When Avatar hit cinema screens in 2009, the reception it garnered was unprecedented even in retrospect. The film’s raison d’etre, it would seem, hinged…
Loving Adults is visually impressive and sporadically interesting, but sacrifices the necessary character depth for this type of film at the altar of melodramatic plot construction. Danish director Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg’s latest film, Loving Adults, adapts Anna Ekberg’s romantic psychodrama of the same name published in 2017. The film is…
In the 25 years since Robert Zemeckis released Contact, the search for extraterrestrials has moved from fringe conspiracy theory to a matter of national security. Earlier this year, the Pentagon even created an official bureau to investigate the phenomena, known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Is…
Three Thousand Years of Longing presents a fairly stimulating academic study in its early going, but ultimately fails to balance its conceptual and emotional aims. In brief outline, the premise of Three Thousand Years of Longing, George Miller’s long-awaited follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, sounds like the…
Though the vast majority of Robert Zemeckis’ films are family-friendly, it’s also easy to find cruelty and blatant sexuality in nearly all of them, the two often intermingled. It might be easy to identify the incestual overtones of Lorraine Baines-McFly’s advances on her future son as a cringeworthy…
For a film whose subject is one of the most famous events in the history of American popular culture, Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand is actually quite intimate. It’s less concerned with representing the scale of the Beatles’ cultural influence, and more interested in the emotional…
I’m not sure people entirely remember the film Audition. Like much of his body of work, director Takashi Miike’s breakthrough into global recognition is perhaps best remembered for its transgressive, stomach-churning imagery, in particular its propulsive final act. Like a lot of horror movies that gained notoriety in…
Squeal is an occasionally striking study of the fairy tales men tell themselves, but it too often feels floundering and under-cooked to be regarded as a success. A traditional quality that behooves most fairy tales is their ability to suspend judgement and disbelief, sometimes to logical extremes, in…
While his first directorial credit for a commercial project was released a decade after the Movie Brats first took hold of Hollywood in the late ’60s to early ’70s — where a mere year after 1978’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, he would collaborate with Steven Spielberg on…
Rule 34 At its core, the intellectual thesis of Julia Murat’s intelligent if inconclusive film belies a more emotional investment. As its title might imply, Rule 34 denotes both the anarchic signification of the eponymous Internet maxim as well as the ambiguous sexual and social politics that have…
There’s a relaxed tone to Alessandro Comodin’s The Adventures of Gigi the Law — one that’s so lackadaisical the film often threatens to stall whenever there’s a moment of inactivity, which constitutes about 90% of the motion picture’s runtime. Take your pick for the film’s most thrilling set…
Spin Me Round, which bafflingly sidelines its most intriguing performer halfway through, ultimately offers little more than a light subversion of European vacay romcoms. Jeff Baena’s Spin Me Round, co-written with its star Alison Brie, sets out as a comedic take on the very Hollywood idea of an…
Human Flowers of Flesh Bouncing back from two years worth of Covid-related disruption while still riding out some major switch-ups and art direction, the Locarno Film Festival returned in 2022 with an international competition lineup more in keeping with the imagination and avant-garde leanings of the programs they…
Since the advent of an autonomous African cinema in the 1960s, Western audiences have grown accustomed to a realist, declarative style that served to describe histories that had been obscured by the legacy of colonialism. But this was as much a tendency on the part of Western tastemakers…
Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s A Woman (Une femme de notre temps) could be taken for a statement film: Juliane (Sophie Marceau) is a Parisian chief of police; her contemporary surroundings foreground the visual signposts and audio reports of a mounting Covid-wave; and the score is ostentatiously selected from the work…