Arnaud Desplechin’s fractured, self-reflexive portrait of corporate anomie, based on British author Edward Bond’s play In the Company of Men, is a frustratingly disjointed and excessively soundtracked (often with unnecessarily cranked up, thematically unrelated music from Paul Weller and The Jam that renders the dialogue inaudible) that is punctuated with episodes of fractured clarity. Fusing […]
Part first-hand historical testament on South African anti-apartheid movement and part essay confessional (or perhaps even emotional exorcism) on the filmmaker and activist, Rehad Desai’s absence during the formative years of his own son’s life, Born into Struggle is an intimate and provocative examination of the personal legacy and intangible familial toll caused by the […]
Favorably evoking Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie in its taut, slow brewing, and unnerving portrait of dysfunctional class relations, Denis Dercourt’s The Page Turner is a distilled, understated, and elegantly realized psychological tale of fragility, revenge, and manipulation. At the heart of Dercourt’s dark allegory is a polite, attractive, and meticulous young woman named Mélanie Prouvost […]
Perhaps better known for his early career in photojournalism or his austere, yet sublime ethnographic portraitures of the Sahara desert in such docufiction films as Captive of the Desert and Un Homme sans l’occident, Raymond Depardon continues in a similar vein as his earlier exposition into the domestic justice system of Délits flagrants in The […]
The first film on tap for A Luminous Century: Celebrating Norwegian Cinema was Rune Denstag and Sivge Endresen’s Too Much Norway, a film that, as a Norwegian American audience member appropriately pointed out, was a film “made for Norwegians, not for export.” Indeed, there are no indications of a National Geographic travelogue at work in […]
A textured panorama of modern day Africa’s dynamic and volatile cross-cultural landscape, Claire Denis’s White Material is an abstract and elemental, if oddly sterile rumination on colonial legacy and socioeconomic stagnation. Unfolding in episodic flashbacks as second-generation coffee plantation owner, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) scrambles to make her way back home after a forced evacuation […]