The Year Before the War begins with an impressive sequence shot; in closeup, workers methodically cut huge blocks of ice out of a frozen lake. The camera pulls back to reveal a man whispering to frozen fish about death, before immediately plunging himself into the icy maw while…
Sode Yukiko has no qualms with announcing her Aristocrats as a literary project, unveiling its status as an adaptation of the novel Ano Ko wa Kizoku by Mariko Yamauchi before any credits, and even the title card. Its novelistic sweep is modest, but still manages to follow different…
As We Like it The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly sounds appealing. As does the idea of transmuting Shakespeare’s Edenic Forest of Arden into an internet-free zone of play and gender non-conformity. Unfortunately, filmmakers…
Little Fish is a pointless exercise in bleakness that boasts neither interesting characters nor much visual character. Chad Hartigan’s Little Fish dares to answer a question that not a single soul on the planet has ever asked or even pondered: What if Michael Haneke’s Amour instead featured…young people? That’s…
The Wanting Mare is a genuine CGI novelty, a delicate, low-key work of great sensitivity. More often than not, when one thinks of special effects extravaganzas, the mind wanders first to the Marvel/DC superhero industrial complex, or perhaps to something like Robert Zemeckis’ lost decade of mo-cap experiments. Further…
In the Same Breath For a while, Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath makes for a fascinating companion piece to Ai Weiwei’s 2020 documentary CoroNation. Neither director has been shy with their criticisms of the Chinese government, and so it’s immediately fascinating to see how their approaches to…
If there’s one all-too noticeable thread running through this year’s Sundance slate, it’s the presence of an unofficial COVID-themed lineup set apart by their incidental, and intentional in some cases, alignments of setting, scope, and content. An obvious outcome, perhaps, but more pressingly a sign of standards to…
Pleasure “Are you here for business or for pleasure?” “Pleasure.” Leaving her Swedish small-town life for the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, 19-year-old Linnéa (Sofia Kappel) carries herself with a worldly confidence that belies her delicate naïveté. She has come to seek pleasure in the porn industry,…
John and the Hole Tapped by Cannes for its theoretical 2020 slate, John and the Hole carried a bit more intrigue than most films heading into Sundance ’21. This designation, regrettably, is mere red herring, as Pascual Sisto’s debut is but another in this millennium’s spate of creepy…
Dara of Jasenovac borders of propaganda, more concerned with stoking ongoing political turmoil than honoring the tragedy at its core. Dara of Jasenovac, Serbia’s official submission to the 93rd Academy Awards, is perhaps one of the more obscure titles currently vying for the Best International Film Oscar, but it’s…
The Sparks Brothers For most of their fans and listeners, a first encounter with Sparks did not result in the assumption that the duo of Ron and Russell Mael were two Californian-born musicians. In fact, at that time, Sparks’ work bore a sound that could suggest many origins,…
It seems only appropriate that Wong Kar-wai would lend his name as producer to One for the Road, an epic melodrama from Thai director Nattawut Poonpiriya that throbs with pangs of romantic longing and regret. A sharp thematic and tonal turn from 2017’s Bad Genius, Poonpiriya’s teen heist…
CODA The title of Siân Heder’s sophomore feature is twofold: an acronym for the “child of deaf adults,” and the concluding passage or movement of a music piece. Centered around seventeen-year-old Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member in her deaf family of four, CODA mainly adopts…
Malcolm and Marie is an affecting meditation on the private life of relationships and the closed-door conflicts that arise in the absence of an audience. When film and television production came to a halt last March due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, the entertainment industry panicked. With…
Palmer has noble intentions and a winning performance from Timberlake, but it’s thematically undercooked and tonally jarring. Apple TV+’s Palmer, the latest film from actor/director Fisher Stevens, is a lot of things: a classic tale of personal redemption; a woke study of gender identity; a thoughtful plea for tolerance;…
A Note on Selection and Organization Criteria The albums in our canon were categorized according to the year and label that granted them their earliest release anywhere in the world — except in certain cases where a later release may have been deemed more “canonical” (for instance choosing to list Public Image Ltd.’s Second…
Breaking Fast is a delicate, charming, and welcomingly chaste love story that features an old-fashioned appeal. The marketing materials for the new queer comedy Breaking Fast make the film look like the kind of salacious, low-budget filler clogging the pipelines of Amazon Prime, with its smiling, attractive male leads…
Savage State is more fetish than flesh, settling for cyphers that vaguely reflect old Western classics. Although the Western may be long past its heyday, there are still filmmakers working within the genre who are trying to redefine and revive it, through the introduction of new ideas and other…
Supernova is a restrained love story that manages to balance out the territory’s innate sentimentality. While actor-turned-director Harry Macqueen’s debut film Hinterland utilized the premise of a road trip to chronicle a fractured, intimate relationship (earning fetching reviews from critics in the process), his follow-up, Supernova, also features a…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of…
Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers. Film About A Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ latest, and evidently most personal, feat of documentation. Patched together from various conversations and intimate moments inked on 16mm film,…