Set in an unidentified Protestant village in northern Germany during the early part of the twentieth century, Michael Haneke’s luminous and atmospheric The White Ribbon is a crystallization of his recurring preoccupations with the ambiguity of truth, class division, surveillance, and the violence of repression. Prefacing the story with the acknowledgment that his memory of […]
Michael Haneke’s latest offering, Caché brilliantly converges towards early Harun Farocki themes of surveillance and terrorism though images while retaining his own recurring themes on the abstraction of videoimage representation (as in The Seventh Continent), the desensitization of images (as in Benny’s Video), and the breakdown of (social) order as a consequence of failed communication […]
Set in the indeterminate milieu of an idyllically pastoral, rural province, a family from “the city” arrives at their summer home for a seeming holiday getaway to find a hostile, armed squatter and his family in the premises. Following an unprovoked act of senseless violence, Anna (Isabelle Huppert) and her children, Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and […]
Otar Iosseliani’s understated and reassuringly familiar abstract comedies are incisive, universal expositions on human absurdity, the complications of modern life, and the seasonality of fortune, so it is particularly satisfying to see the unremarkable (anti)hero of his latest film, Gardens of Autumn break through this corruptive and dysfunctional cycle of power, materialism, and social mobility […]
In a well-appointed villa in seventeenth century Spain, a wealthy, widowed noblewoman, Otavia (Verónica Forqué) vows to marry off her two beautiful, but problematic daughters: Nise (Macarena Gómez), whose dark, smoldering beauty is equally matched by the ferocity of her intellect and penchant for uncompromising, philosophical debates with the finest intellectuals of the day, and […]
In the review for Sara Johnsen’s understated and intelligently realized debut feature Kissed by Winter, Mode Steinkjer writes, “The last part of the film’s key moments are accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung by Jeff Buckley in his version that is both beautiful and atmospheric. For me the song works to elevate the drama because […]