Alternately humorous and heartbreaking in its candid and unflinching portrait of the exploited lives of low rate prostitutes living in the shantytown of La Línea in Guatemala City (an emblematic place of abject poverty built along the marginal buffer zones of railroad tracks that also evokes Ditsi Carolino’s Life on the Tracks), Chema Rodriguez’s The […]
In a way, Bullet in the Head continues to push the level of alienation created in Jaime Rosales’s earlier films, The Hours of the Day (shot from the perspective of a serial killer) and Solitary Fragments (shot from the parallel perspectives of a terrorist attack survivor and members of an estranged family), this time, to […]
By the time the final, pillow shot of Solitary Fragments unfolds – a congested panorama of dour, monolithic structures, interchangeable, tiled rooftops, and mobile cranes hovering over the cityscape in a perpetual state of construction and demolition – I was convinced that the film would conclude with some sort of postscript dedication to Edward Yang. […]
A Kurdish-American man named Diyari travels to the village of Halabja, one of the targeted sites of the 1988 chemical and biological bombing of the Iraqi Kurdistan region by the Iraqi military (acting under Saddam Hussein’s Anfal genocide campaign against the Kurds), on a personal humanitarian effort to build a facility in order to accommodate […]
Divorced single parent, successful attorney, sans-papiers advocate, and not-so-obscure object of desire Chantal Letellier (Carole Bouquet) has led a fairly manageable life of controlled chaos in her comfortable, if occasionally unhinged flat until one day when she seizes the opportunity of a vacated sublet upstairs maid’s room to open up their living space and convert […]
Structured as a tale within a tale, Raoul Ruiz’s fractured, defiantly illogical Nucingen House returns to the territory of On Top of the Whale and its otherworldly, tongue in cheek sense of foreboding in its hermetic construction of polyglot characters, suspended time, and inescapable limbo. Unfolding as a reconstructed memory told by an American gambler, […]