Part police procedural and part character study of the camaraderie of detective work, Xavier Beauvois evokes the unsentimentality and objective, cinéma vérité-styled painstaking observation of Maurice Pialat – with similar conflicted results – in his latest film Le Petit Lieutenant. The titular rookie investigator is Antoine (Jalil Lespert), a prototypical provincial cop from Normandy eager […]
In a sense, Robert Beavers’s muted, sensual, and reverently observed short film diary, Pitcher of Colored Light may be seen as a companion piece to the climactic, long awaited homecoming sequence in Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (albeit without the reflective commentary) – a personal chronicle that similarly evokes the silent intimacy […]
Jean-Pierre Bekolo channels the manic freeverse, urban culture, and confrontational humor of Spike Lee’s early films in Quartier Mozart, an eccentric, socially incisive fable on a schoolgirl known as Queen of the ‘Hood who, with the aid of the village witch, Maman Thekla, asks to experience life as a man in Yaounde’s working class district […]
Less a biography on the early life of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini than a dissection into creating (and sustaining) a cult of personality, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is a textured, operatic, and incisive historical fiction based on the fate of Mussolini’s secret first wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) who, along with their son, Benito Albino, were […]
Based on the real-life kidnapping of President Aldo Moro by members of a terrorist organization known as the Red Brigade in 1978, Good Morning, Night is a compelling, thoughtful, and understatedly powerful film that captures the turmoil and uncertainty caused by Moro’s (Roberto Herlitzka) brazen kidnapping and the subsequent 53 days of frustratingly stalled and […]
A young boy named Leonardo (Alberto Mondini) distractedly paces outside his home within view of his quizzical mother Irene (Jacqueline Lustig) as he seemingly conducts an impassioned conversation with himself. Distressed by the overwhelming concept of an omniscient God (an idea that he has recently learned during his religion study hour at school) from whom […]