Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as a “horizontal” story. Taken together, of course, the matter is quite different, and the resulting triptych has been described as a kind of…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only if you choose to tease it out, as he’s otherwise content to foreground the immediate virtues of each film, an approach that 2003’s…
The State I Am In, Christian Petzold’s theatrical feature debut, begins with a song. Opening on a profile shot of its central character, Jeanne (Julia Hummer), as she buys a drink at a beach café, goes to a jukebox to put on Tim Hardin’s “How Can We Hang…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing his serial enthusiasm for genre alongside his signature undercurrents of fleeting but doomed passion, Cuba Libre, his made-for-television second feature, quietly aches and smolders…
One of the great madcap poets of the American cinema, Alan Rudolph has seemingly slipped into irrelevance since his heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. If he’s mentioned at all in contemporary discourse, it’s usually to acknowledge his apprenticeship (of a sort) with Robert Altman, or the handful…
Deliver Us from Evil fails in both its attempts at severe drama and action spectacle, proving an equal opportunity offender in the process. If the title of Hong Won-chan’s nihilistic slog of a crime thriller Deliver Us from Evil points to anything, it’s that the film’s milieu is made…
Few, if any, artists in the history of modern popular music experienced a creative eruption as rich as did Miles Davis did in the years leading up to his temporary retirement in 1975. Already the biggest name in jazz and the progenitor of numerous stylistic innovations, by the…
Spring Blossom feels under-realized on the whole, but at least introduces a distinct authorial voice worth following. Part of the official selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival that never was, Spring Blossom sees Suzanne Lindon, daughter of renowned French actors Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, direct and star…
Freedom. is a platitude-heavy onslaught of alternately generic and sympathy-seeking songwriting that makes for a wholly embarrassing EP. Offering a second helping of solipsistic pop psalms just in time for Easter, Justin Bieber has “blessed” listeners with a new EP worth of material only a mere month after…
Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi Rhiannon Giddens may not be the only musician who recorded an album during lockdown, but she may be one of the best-suited for such a project. For one thing, she spent quarantine with her partner, the jazz instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, with whom she…
“Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong.” This message from Stevie Wonder to his listeners was embossed in braille on the cover of the original LP pressings of Talking Book, his 1972…
Spiral fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of the Saw franchise, deviating from the series formula to remarkably diminished results. Spiral: From the Book of Saw is but the latest attempt to reboot the infamous Saw franchise, a horror series so popular that it essentially kicked off the entire “torture porn” fad that…
Pablo Escoto’s All the Light We Can See comes with a bibliography in its end credits, a kind of road map to its poetically cryptic approach to narrative. An experimental film in the truest sense, it’s simultaneously epic and intimate, like a community theater production writ large. With…
Dark Red Forest Spiritual faith, by virtue of its abstract and elusive qualities, rarely translates well to the visual medium, if indeed it can be translated at all. Depictions of this faith have ranged from the sacred to the sacrilegious, articulated with either austere minimalism or gratuitous violence.…
Although The Flowers of St. Francis sits comfortably within one Roberto Rossellini’s most lauded creative stretches , it’s a work that still doesn’t exactly have a home in any of the three subcategories that have been parceled out from the director’s filmography: the neorealist period, his partnership with…
Here Today is a baffling, schmaltzy oddball of a film that finds Billy Crystal profoundly out of touch. There’s been something of a recent resurgence when it comes to yesteryear comedians, as the likes of Bill Murray, Steve Martin, and Martin Short have all found renewed success as yet…
A chandelier swings in the gloom, tremulous strings kick in and tension mounts as the camera pulls in. The glinting fixture rocks back and forth through the inky blackness. It is untethered, its branching arms look skeletal, almost otherworldly, and just as the score crescendos, we fade out…
Once seen as a tragic fall from grace, today it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear someone sing the praises of the movies Francis Ford Coppola made in the 1980s. Starting with One From The Heart in ’81, the maverick director followed up Apocalypse Now…
Here Are the Young Men fixates on its most histrionic narrative beats and hypermasculine conflicts at the expense of its greater strengths. Set in 2003 Ireland, Eoin Macken’s Here Are The Young Men follows Michael (Dean-Charles Chapman), Kearney (Finn Cole), and Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) over the summer after…
Together Together is a chemistry-rich, mature, and restrained effort of non-rom comedy. It’s never a promising sign when a film’s opening credits mimic a certain Woody Allen style, white Windsor font on a black background, a half-familiar jazz tune opening things up. But writer/director Nikole Beckwith’s gentle new…
DEACON doesn’t match the memorable, eerie energy of soil, but is still mostly successful as an articulation of serpentwithfeet’s new, breezy era (interlude?) of calm. There’s a certain irony to the all-caps stylization of serpentwithfeet’s (née Josiah Wise) latest album, DEACON, as it’s a distinctly mellowed, less assuming…