Poignant, humorous, and exquisitely realized, Randa Chahal-Sabbag’s The Kite follows the plight of a beautiful and carefree Lebanese girl named Lamia (Flavia Bechara) who, after recklessly tempting fate by briefly trespassing into the mined, Israeli-controlled heavily militarized buffer zone in order to retrieve her kite, is ruled by her village council to be prepared for […]
In its incarnation as a 21st century, recession-era satire on worker exploitation and the intersection between globalism and geopolitics, Sabu’s Kanikosen is an atmospheric, if diluted adaptation of Takiji Kobayashi’s Shōwa-era leftist novel. Set aboard an Imperial Navy-escorted (and implicitly, sanctioned), crab canning ship operating near (and often, over) the Russian-controlled Sea of Okhotsk, the […]
There is a palpable sentiment of trying to capture the ephemeral that runs through Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a film that further modulates his now familiar aesthetic of melding abstract episodes of hypnotic time drift with the alienated portrait of imploding, angry youth that have characterized his more recent films (beginning with his Béla […]
Structured in elegantly fluid and elliptically interconnected episodes from a roving, multiple student point-of-view, Elephant is an incisive and poetic, yet relevant and deeply disturbing portrait of the unfolding of a fictional, modern-day high school massacre in suburban America. Van Sant presents a richly textured and complexly interwoven series of mundane student interactions and astute […]
The Fly-Up Preceding Marat Sarulu’s feature film, My Brother Silk Road is the filmmaker’s short film, The Fly-Up, a quiet observation of a factory furnace worker’s idyllic afternoon of rest as he attempts to escape the oppressiveness of his existence by taking a nap on the rooftop, watching a beautiful young neighbor as she paints […]
Based on the futuristic novel by seminal science fiction author Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika is a bold, provocative, mind-bending, and fiercely intelligent exposition into the nature of terrorism, the demystification of the subconscious, and the psychology of fetishism and objectification. A rash of thefts involving a developmental prototype dreamcatcher device, code named DC Mini, the brainchild […]