Set in a company-sponsored orienteering contest – a false peril, team-building competition that pits administrative departments against each other in navigating their way out of a vast, public recreational park in the least amount of time by locating a prescribed series of trail markers using only the provisions and equipment provided to them at the […]
It is nearly impossible to characterize Michele Placido’s sprawling, ambitious, and elliptical gangster film, Crime Novel without raising the specter of Francesco Rosi’s seminal cinema on the murky atmosphere of corruption, nebulous alliances, terrorism, and widespread violence that defined the sociopolitical landscape of 1970s Italy. However, while Rosi’s disorienting ellipticism served to illustrate the power […]
The disjunction between moral and bureaucratic law, meaning and intent shapes the discourse of Corneliu Porumboiu’s meticulously observed, if clinical and muted procedural film, Police, Adjective. Assigned to conduct surveillance on a typical, middle-class teenager named Alex (Alexandru Sabadac) who is suspected of dealing drugs, junior detective and newlywed, Cristi (Dragos Bucur) spends his days […]
Deep in the Woods (Benoît Jacquot) Having been going through something of film burnout that began midway through the New York Film Festival last year, I had planned to attend only a few screenings from this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema as a way of working through the inertia. The film that finally succeeded in […]
Dark City is a haunting, surreal, and stunning cinematic achievement from Alex Proyas: an amalgam of German expressionism, science fiction and film noir. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens at midnight in a bathtub, paranoid and amnesiac, with a primitive instrument on the floor, a bloody knife on the table, and a woman’s corpse behind the […]
Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy […]