Some Kind of Heaven finds legitimate pathos within the oddball trappings of a would-be utopian retirement community. From the cold and gloomy vantage of New York’s post-pandemic winter, a chance to escape into a sunny, pre-Covid Florida sure sounds tempting. Watching Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind…
Much like the iconoclast at the center of this doc, Zappa is singular, uncompromising, and riveting. Whether you appreciate Frank Zappa’s work, few would deny the massive impact he had on contemporary art music. The musician, who died relatively young after a terminal battle with…
Collective is a compelling portrait of bureaucratic inertia and stasis and a rich study in the difficulties of actual progress. On October 30, 2015, a fire broke out in the Colectiv concert club in Bucharest, killing 27 on site. In the following months, another 37…
About Endlessness is a gentler than usual work from Roy Andersson, one that reflects humanity’s ability to create both great beauty and profound suffering. Those complaining that Wes Anderson’s movies all look the same have clearly never encountered the work of Roy Andersson. Over the…
Out Stealing Horses is a lame prestige film knockoff that trades in empty platitudes. Based on the acclaimed 2003 Norweigan novel of the same name, the decades-spanning drama Out Stealing Horses comes suffused with pedigree. Directed by Hans Petter Moland (In Order of Disappearance, Aberdeen),…
The Whistlers makes the most of its basic parts, tying some nifty knots and glossing up proceedings, but it fails to offer anything memorable. Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers is a tight, satisfying crime yarn — even if its small quirks and arthouse sheen sometimes get in the…
The films of Jessica Hausner can be maddeningly opaque, but obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. Her newest film, Little Joe, makes a fascinating double feature with 2009’s Lourdes, a film that also takes a fantastical scenario and grounds it in the quotidian. In fact, Little Joe could…
Before We Vanish by Christopher Bourne Film
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am | Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Early in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Morrison tells a story from her childhood about when she first came to understand the power of the written word. She and her sister learned to read and write partly by copying the…
Adapted from Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson’s long form poem of the same name, Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara skews largely sensationalist — to its detriment. The film’s logline remains faithful to its science-fiction source material: a massive, Mars-bound spaceship packed with colonists finds…
“What the fuck are you thinking?” a police chief asks dog groomer Marcello (a cartoonishly wide-eyed Marcello Fonte) about halfway through Dogman. He asks this question after Marcello has allowed the brutish, coke-fueled Simon (Edoardo Pesce) access into his business afterhours in order to rob…
