There is a palpable sentiment of trying to capture the ephemeral that runs through Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a film that further modulates his now familiar aesthetic of melding abstract episodes of hypnotic time drift with the alienated portrait of imploding, angry youth that have characterized his more recent films (beginning with his Béla […]
Structured in elegantly fluid and elliptically interconnected episodes from a roving, multiple student point-of-view, Elephant is an incisive and poetic, yet relevant and deeply disturbing portrait of the unfolding of a fictional, modern-day high school massacre in suburban America. Van Sant presents a richly textured and complexly interwoven series of mundane student interactions and astute […]
Based on the futuristic novel by seminal science fiction author Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika is a bold, provocative, mind-bending, and fiercely intelligent exposition into the nature of terrorism, the demystification of the subconscious, and the psychology of fetishism and objectification. A rash of thefts involving a developmental prototype dreamcatcher device, code named DC Mini, the brainchild […]
On an isolated pueblo in the heart of the Spanish countryside, the seemingly familiar story of fickle young love unravels to incomprehensible tragedy when the spurned lover, Luciana Fuentes, expresses a vengeful wish on her seducer in the presence of her fragmented, devoted brother Jerónimo who, in turn, executes his sister’s wish, resulting in the […]
A prevailing thread that continues to weave through Carlos Saura’s aesthetically fluid, articulate, and refreshingly (re)inventive cinema is in his instinctual acuity to capture society’s moral landscape – invariably transfiguring and adapting conventional film form in unexpected, often groundbreaking ways that, in their bracing novelty, also becomes a refracted, secondary reflection of their culturally rooted […]
While Blood Wedding, the first dance film in what would evolve to be Carlos Saura’s flamenco trilogy collaboration with choreographer Antonio Gades, distilled the art of flamenco to the essential movement of bodies and expression of the human voice, and the subsequent installment, Carmen examined the integral, often interpenetrating relationship between reality and performance (albeit, […]