Steve McQueen has spent the last decade making films that are quite decidedly about America, creating a body of work in the process that carries significant cultural weight here (Oscars!) while very much representing the British filmmaker’s Euro perspective. This perspective often provides McQueen…
John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) — a staggering, four and a half-hour-long “cinematic prose poem” concerning Clark Air Base Command, a former United States military facility located in the Philippines, and the collective traumatic and ecological fallout left in the wake of unchecked imperialism…
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is now a near-universally revered and beloved historical icon, but as Sam Pollard’s meticulous and quietly infuriating documentary MLK/FBI shows, this was not always the case, especially during King’s lifetime. Based on historian and King biographer David…
Filmmakers Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy, who consider themselves purveyors of “expanded cinema” — a loose, catch-all term for video and performance art that has been in use at least since Gene Youngblood’s seminal 1970 book of the same name — have…
by Lawrence Garcia Film
There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse | Nicolás Zukerfeld
The second chapter of Argentine director Nicolás Zukerfeld’s hour-long cine-essay, There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse, is a fleet, funny, and inventive piece of work. Narrated largely against a black screen, with only the occasional textual annotation…
Steve McQueen has always been a fine purveyor of potentially rich and powerful narratives, but he’s been much less consistent as their steward. His first three features (Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave) all focused on singular individuals locked in combat with dominant cultural…
Fauna, Mexican-Canadian director Nicolás Pereda’s ninth feature, begins with that most familiar of low-budget indie-film setups: a pair of artists (actors in this case), Paco (Francisco Barreiro) and Luisa (Luisa Pardo), take to the road together for a weekend trip. But the film soon…
The Truffle Hunters is a relatively modest festival contender, though one can see why it’s found traction on the circuit, with major play at Sundance, Toronto, and now New York. Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, who previously collaborated on the 2018 stock car racing…
Song Fang’s long-awaited second feature film premiered at Berlin shortly before the world it depicts completely fell apart. As such, it is the perfect film to watch in this time of socially distanced online film festivals, at least for those of us who enjoy…
Inspired by both director Ephraim Asili’s personal experiences living in a Black radical collective and the formalism of late-’60s Godard (a giant poster of La Chinoise occasionally pops up to make this more blatantly obvious), The Inheritance serves as a sociopolitical update on a…
