Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream isn’t the exercise in solipsism or self-serving appropriative art its premise threatens, but its overall effect is one of cautious distance. In 2010, visual artist Christian Marclay premiered a new montage work, titled The Clock, that was 24-hours in length…
To the Ends of the Earth is a masterwork of adventurous, boundary-less filmmaking. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film is set — and which is indeed new territory, geographically speaking — but to this border zone openly contested…
Fire Will Come retains a kind of documentary-based fascination even as it becomes clear capturing the titular blaze was the only real objective here. Oliver Laxe‘s Fire Will Come is a film built upon two contrasting modes. On one hand, there’s its ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere,…
The Wolf House is a darkly magical fairy tale of arthouse cinema. To describe a film as magical may be a usually empty judgment, but in the case of Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Wolf House, it is, in fact, fitting. It is…
Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest is a rhythmic, matter-of-fact portrait of economic compromise. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Earth, from the outset, frames its massive landscapes as sites of continual transformation; large-scale machinery usually litters the frame, excavating the planet indiscriminately and gradually altering its surface. Most of this…
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is a documentary with an almost confounding resolve to simply document. Given the subject matter — the intertwined lives of four different groups of African-Americans living in the deep South during the summer of 2017…
Following in the footsteps of Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, and Steve McQueen, amongst others, Birmingham-born artist Richard Billingham makes the jump from the gallery to feature films with Ray & Liz. But the fact that Billingham is a photographer known for portraiture is key to what doesn’t…
The enduring impulse to defamiliarize — that is, to (re-)present something as novel or new — is at the heart of Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists. Directed from a script by Robin Schavoir and James N. Kienitz Wilkins, this 76-minute feature opens in programmatic, low-budget indie form:…
The primary appeal of Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young is its seductive portrayal of a liminal state. Set in a bohemian commune in the Chilean countryside, a year after the downfall of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the film (which won the Golden Leopard for…
An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo’s bleak epic of lives spent swimming upstream in the modern economic conditions of China, is an exacting depiction of depression. Even without knowing the circumstances behind the film (its director took his own life last October), an unrelenting…
