Francisco J. Lombardi’s What the Eye Doesn’t See is a convoluted, yet acutely illustrative fictionalized account of the desperate, intertwined lives of several Peruvian citizens who represent a cross-section of the country’s socio-economic strata during the uncertainty of the ever-increasing scandal surrounding the intricate web of corruption woven by presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos that eventually […]
Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Erik Lochen’s remarkably light and agile, yet ingeniously constructed and elegantly realized film, The Hunt similarly plays on the author’s recurring themes of memory, atemporality, and psychological reality. Prefiguring Alain Resnais’ collaborative film with Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (the film was made in the same […]
In an incisive encounter in The Education of Shelby Knox, (then) high-school student Shelby from Lubbock – a devout, abstinent, southern Baptist, child of conservative Republicans, and fierce advocate for comprehensive sex education in the classroom as a means of curtailing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, stemming off widespread health misinformation, and promoting important […]
Note to Pati, 1969 Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage, Note to Pati presents a seemingly typical winter scene – the day after a snow storm […]
On the surface, the stationary, extended long take of a desolate, tree-lined woods, the unhurried opening shot of Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen (channelling a sublimated naturalism that recalls Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light), seems disconnected from the film’s succeeding, fragmented images of the quotidian. In one episode, a middle-aged woman, Maria (Catherine […]
Something like a neutered cross between Dan Pita’s bituminous satire on dysfunctional leadership, Orienteering, and Nicolas Klotz’s exposition on corporate moral conscience (and amnesia) La Question humaine, Max Lemcke’s Casual Day is a serviceable, if slight and pedestrian take on the inherent fallacy of team building exercises that serve only to reinforce institutionalized power structures […]