During the Q&A for Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro commented that he conceived the image of Pale Man, a child-eating creature who could only see by raising his hands up to his face (as if paradoxically covering his eyes), as an allusion to the perverted image of stigmata – an affliction often associated with enlightened […]
An anonymous, gaunt young man (Le Van Loc) pedals his rented cyclo (pedicab) through the crowded streets of Ho Chi Minh city (modern day Saigon) in search of a fare, stopping periodically to rest and to clean away the grime and dust of pollution from his feet. It is a legacy of meager livelihood that […]
The Rolling Family is characteristic of the recent wave of Argentinean novo cinema to have hit international shores in the past few years: decentralized and organic narrative, ensemble hybrid casting of professional and non-professional actors that lends itself to muted expressivity (albeit with occasionally spirited outbursts) and contextually immersed, overlapping dialogue, and deliberately paced observations […]
Shot in vérité-styled camerawork and natural lighting, Omagh is a hauntingly powerful, illuminating, and uncompromisingly rendered account of the August 15, 1998 car bombing of a high-traffic market square in the peacefully integrated Northern Ireland community that massacred 29 civilians and injured over 200 others. Shot from the perspective of Michael Gallagher and his family, […]
Lars von Trier’s films have always had a polarizing effect, and I’ll acknowledge that, after having seen several of his major works (Zentropa, Element of Crime, Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, and Dancer in the Dark), I’ve always been in the detractors’ camp. The consummate provocateur’s latest film, Dogville, is no exception: an over-the-top, emotionally manipulative […]
The opening image of author, poet, theorist, composer, ethnographer, and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first digital video feature, The Fourth Dimension is a view from a moving vehicle on a fog-laden stretch of highway at dusk. A secondary rectangular frame then blocks the visible image of the fleeting landscape, and the aperture begins to drift, […]