The long-standing theoretical association made between watching cinema and being in a dream-like state is one that’s rooted in a firm misunderstanding about the autonomy of the viewing public, seeming to suggest that an audience member is a sort of malleable object — one…
Yourself and Yours is a surreal, playful, and sometimes brilliant puzzle of a film from director Hong Sang-soo. In Yourself and Yours, we find Hong Sang-soo amusing himself by writing scenes that are completely ambivalent in nature, mainly due to having lead actress Lee…
Liberté is gorgeous and confounding, a Brechtian presentation of passion, tedium and perversion. Albert Serra’s Liberté continues the director’s penchant for placing human rot, literal and metaphorical, within the garish trappings and knowing artifice of re-creation. Presented here are the wanton sexual and violent revels of…
I Was at Home, But… is an admirable but obnoxious examination of the nature of artifice. At right around the halfway mark of writer-director Angela Schanelec’s latest film, I Was at Home, But…, recently widowed mother Astrid (Maren Eggert) goes off on a literal five-minute rant about…
An experimental documentary of modest means and sweeping scale, Chinese Portrait offers a scintillating snapshot of a rapidly changing nation. Director Wang Xiaoshuai assembled the film from footage taken during his travels around the country over course of a decade. Much like a travelogue,…
If José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia (2007) were reconceived as a contemporary gay drama, its opening might look something like the first minutes of Lucio Castro’s ND/NF 2019 entry End of the Century. Following a handsome fortyish man named Ocho (Juan…
The Wandering Soap Opera manages to create the perfect portrait of a nation without culture, without guidance, lost in a post-dictatorial haze. Filmed in 1990 in the context of a workshop that Raúl Ruiz held with actors and technicians who knew about him, but…
Suburban Birds opens with an iris shot, a formal gesture that likens it to Feng Xiaogang’s recent I Am Not Madame Bovary. Quickly, Qiu Sheng’s film reveals this to be the POV of a land surveyor looking through his theodolite. In its first half, the…
Two decades on now and Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become something of a genre unto himself. To those that concern themselves with film festivals and prestigey world cinema, his name carries with it a check list of thematic interests and formal predilections. Lord knows there…
The American Western — usually identified by its action, machismo, and its oftentimes flimsy portrayal of Native American genocide — has also always dealt with borders. The Mormons of John Ford’s Wagon Master drift into the territory of Utah sixteen years before its statehood in order to find…
