Beginning emerges from the influence of obvious formal antecedents to become a stirring, singular work from a new cinematic worth following. On its surface, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut, Beginning, immediately recalls Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light. It’s an obvious connection, as both films are set within cloistered…
There is potential potency to the character work in A Family Tour, but the flat direction renders nearly every scene frustratingly inert. There’s no shortage of justified anger in Ying Liang’s semi-autobiographical A Family Tour. In following up 2012’s When Night Falls, the film that…
Wonders in the Suburbans is an unwieldy affair, taking supposedly comedic pot-shots at any number of targets without any clear vision. Jeanne Balibar’s brand of idiosyncrasy — most recently and prominently displayed in Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara — curdles with her solo directorial debut, Wonders in…
Dolan’s latest intrigues in deviating from the director’s familiar mode, but its busyness never fully distills into any cogent statement. Matthias & Maxime, the 2019 Cannes competition nominee and most recent film of Canadian actor-director-producer-writer-editor Xavier Dolan, will be familiar fare to those who…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that renders the line between real and artificial indistinct. Titled as it is — Family Romance LLC, after the company — the film plays out…
MS Slavic 7 is an ambiguous, mechanistic work that seeks to understand the divide (and bridge) between passion and scholarship. Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s low-key, documentary-style drama MS Slavic 7 is about a young woman, Audrey (Campbell), who discovers her late, great-grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s…
The first feature-length work from avant-garde filmmaker/animator/composer Jodie Mack defies easy categorization. The Grand Bizarre is a sort of musical (like her Yard Work Is Hard Work and Dusty Stacks of Mom) in that Mack’s rhythmic editing is synchronized with her original synth-pop score,…
Set in the remote valley of Qadishi, in Northern Lebanon, Abbas Fahdel’s Yara is a limited, if verdant vision of quotidian life. Centered on an orphaned teen girl (Michelle Wehbe) — the title character — who lives with her grandmother, the film observes a…
The latest film from Filipino director Lav Diaz to make it to US streaming services is the almost four-hour long, politically charged, a cappella musical Season of the Devil — a film that is, per the director himself, “about motherfuckers like Donald Trump.” A…
If Gerardo Naranjo hadn’t already taken the title I’m Gonna Explode for his 2008 portrait of adolescent rebellion, it would have made a fitting option for Permanent Green Light, the sophomore feature from co-directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. Then again, perhaps that would…
