Loosely adapted from novelist Walter Wager’s 1971 thriller, Viper Three, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is Robert Aldrich’s impassioned and provocative excoriation – and, perhaps implicitly, exorcism – of the American government’s administrative Cold War policy that sought to wage a representative, small-scale, protracted ideological war in Vietnam in order to reinforce a “doctrine of credibility” to […]
A patently offbeat and whimsical confection, Merzak Allouache’s Chouchou recalls the more predictably rocambolesque, light comedies of Francis Veber (particularly, La Cage aux Folles), as a displaced foreigner named Choukri (Gad Elmaleh), nicknamed Chouchou by his late mother, claiming to be a Chilean political exile (albeit anachronistically after the fall of Augusto Pinochet), finds refuge […]
Something like an unconstructed take on Peter Mettler’s epic essay film, Gambling, Gods and LSD, Michael Almereyda’s Paradise similarly assembles a series of fragmentary, cross-cultural, quotidian images taken from the filmmaker’s video diaries that reflect on fundamental human questions of life, existential purpose, and transcendence. In an early episode in the film, a man passing […]
A young woman named Amelia (Liane Balaban), has arrived in New Orleans to search for her sister, Muriel (Shalom Harlow) after she abruptly and inexplicably lost contact with her, and the key to the beautiful young woman’s disappearance seems to lie in the formatted hard drive of her laptop computer. It is through this mysterious […]
Ingeniously constructed as parallel metafilms – one, Ray X’s (Rubén Ochandiano) behind the scenes documentary that illustrates the intersection (and disjunction) between reality and fiction; the other, Mateo’s (Lluís Homar) reconstruction of a doomed film project made 14 years earlier that reflects the role of the filmmaker as archaeologist and conjurer – Pedro Almodóvar’s wry, […]
Volver ingeniously opens to the title sequence illustrating a familiar All Souls Day ritual in a rural village in La Mancha, a solemn occasion when families visit the gravesites of their loved ones in a day of caretaking, remembrance, and homecoming, as sisters Sole (Lola Dueñas) and Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), along with Raimunda’s adolescent daughter […]