Recalling the resigned regret of Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (albeit less potent) and Stanley Kwan’s Everlasting Regret in its elliptical intersection of personal and (implicitly political) national history, Lou Ye’s sprawling epic, Summer Palace is an adept and thoughful, if largely perfunctory and tenuous survey of late twentieth century contemporary history from the parallel perspectives […]
On the surface, the stationary, extended long take of a desolate, tree-lined woods, the unhurried opening shot of Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen (channelling a sublimated naturalism that recalls Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light), seems disconnected from the film’s succeeding, fragmented images of the quotidian. In one episode, a middle-aged woman, Maria (Catherine […]
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, […]
In its idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary, self-confessional, and deconstruction, Land of Madness is a droll and refreshing throwback to Luc Moullet’s early essay films like Anatomy of a Relationship and Origins of a Meal. Returning to his bucolic, ancestral hometown in the Southern Alps, Moullet embarks on a whimsical, homegrown investigation of the region’s […]
Peter Mettler’s rigorous and organic meditative essay is (perhaps intentionally) a mind numbing ethnographic collage of people, places, ideas, and discoveries that collective encompass humanity’s innate desire for escapism, commutation, euphoria, and existential transcendence. Originating locally from Mettler’s sad and implicitly tragic reunion with a childhood friend who has led most of his inutile adult […]
The opening sequence of Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay provides an intriguing foil in its organic, intersecting stories that mirror the chaos of the city, as a young working class couple (and new parents) Cecille (Mercedes Cabral) and Peping (Coco Martin) make their way to city hall to get married and, along the way, encounter a news […]