Something of a hybrid between Tsai Ming-liang’s eccentric, temp morts snapshots of human idiosyncrasy crossed with the glacially paced visual abstraction of Sharunas Bartas (most notably, The Corridor and Few of Us) by way of Philippe Grandrieux’s murky, destabilized, and defocused gaze (in particular, Sombre), Yorgos Lanthimos creates a languid, elliptically fractured, and maddeningly opaque, […]
The delineation between reality and mythology, ideal and application also provides the catalyst for Isaki Lacuesta’s first fiction film, Los Condenados (The Condemned). The rupture is prefigured in the opening image of a gaunt, Argentinean expatriate, Martín (Daniel Fanego) undergoing a CT scan at a Spanish hospital, the implication of cancer suggesting a hidden, indefinable […]
Named after legendary flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla’s groundbreaking record album (which, in turn, was inspired by the works of Andalusian poet, Federico García Lorca), Isaki Lacuesta’s The Legend of Time melds the improvised encounters of Johan van der Keuken’s ethnographic documentaries with the quotidian intimacy of Mercedes Álvarez’s El cielo gira to create […]
In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative […]
Sunrise weaves fluidly through the canvas of human emotion with the poetic grace of a silent, visual masterpiece. Directed by German expressionist icon, F.W. Murnau, the film is an ageless tale of dichotomy: betrayal and redemption, duty and hedonism, innocence and guilt, tradition and modernization. The Man, a young husband (George O’Brien), seduced by an […]
Something of an irreverent collision between the offbeat, carnivalesque formalism of Lina Wertmüller or Ulrike Ottinger, and the somber, often sardonic view of despiritualized, post-communist societies from contemporary, ex-Soviet bloc filmmakers such as Darezhan Omirbaev (in particular, Killer), Béla Tarr, and Cristi Puiu, Kira Muratova’s The Tuner is a wry, infectiously offbeat, penetrating, and relevant […]