Fucking with Nobody is a radical, playful bit of meta-comedy that executes its risky conceit with aplomb. For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a filmmaker who, after losing a project…
Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller that grows in unsettling power across its runtime. Andreas Fontana’s Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller, carefully organizing a deceptively placid narrative around two distinct structuring absences. It’s 1980, and a Swiss private banker named Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio…
Diaz‘s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian exploitation. Lahi, Hayop…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. With Yellow Cat, Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has…
Purple Sea is an arthouse trifle that merely effects the posture of serious cinema. In his 1975 book Notes on the Cinematographer, austere French director Robert Bresson advocated for a cinema with “not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images.” How one can define…
Generations isn’t doing anything all that novel for static-shot documentary filmmaking, but as an exercise in how to watch cinema, it’s a plenty worthy effort. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a landscape film with a set number of allocated shots (here, 13), with a…
The Cloud in Her Room is an one-note exercise in empty style that fails to marry its form and content. Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room represents the type of opaque arthouse drama that tends to do exceedingly well on the international film…
All Hands on Deck dabble in tropes and archetypes, but still manages a vibrancy that keeps the film afloat. One of a number of Rohmer riffs making the festival rounds currently, All Hands on Deck (originally titled À l’abordage!) is also the latest film from Guillaume Brac, a…
If Krabi 2562 fails to convince by its end, its argument is at least worth engaging with. Following a short film collaboration for the 2018 Thai Biennale — the first of its kind — Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong and London-based artist Ben Rivers went on…
Air Conditioner is a beautiful, thoughtful work of easygoing charm and surprising intellect. As far as cinematic representations of heat go, Ernest Dickerson’s work on Do the Right Thing remains undefeated, with its yellow tint capturing brick buildings and asphalt streets that seem liable to…
