A barge laborer named Joe (Ewan McGregor) discovers the body of a partially nude woman floating face down in the river and, together with his employer Les (Peter Mullan), retrieve her corpse from the water. Soon, traces of Joe’s seeming over-curiosity with the dead body begin to surface as he gently caresses the body in […]
The Chaser, 2008
Alternating between taut horror film and absurd comedy, Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser is an audacious, if over-contrived and diluted procedural thriller. Inviting comparison to Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (much to the detriment of Na’s film) in its spiraling investigation of a series of murders, The Chaser also suggests kinship with Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s Cure in […]
Rooster’s Breakfast, 2007
During the introduction for the film, Marko Nabersnik mentioned that he had graduated from the New York Film Academy fourteen years earlier and, to some extent, the screening of his film in Lincoln Center was a culmination of that journey. In a way, that experience would also shape his well constructed, entertaining, and pleasant, if […]
NYAFF Short Films: Fanta Régina Nacro
Un Certain Matin, 1991 A farmer named Tiga’s seemingly uneventful trip to the woods sets the stage for an unexpected collision between truth and fiction, reality and celluloid, that is illustrated to wry, comic effect in Fanta Régina Nacro’s first feature, Un Certain Matin. Setting out one morning from his native village on the Mossi […]
Marathon, 2002
There is an early moment of recognition in Marathon when the heroine of the film, Gretchen (Sara Paul), scans one of the crossword puzzle clues (from a handful of puzzles that she has taken with her on the train) and traces the words “Lamb’s pen name”, a perennial New York Times crossword entry (Elia) that […]
The Runner, 1985
A young, impoverished boy named Amiro (Majid Niroumand) observantly stands on the shoreline, his eyes transfixed on a large white ship in the distance, visibly mesmerized. Almost mechanically, he waves his arms repeatedly and calls to the silent, slow moving object. The brief episode is a fleeting, tangential distraction from his daily ritual of survival. […]