While the highly stylized, oneiric sequences in Sound and Fury portend Jean-Claude Brisseau’s preoccupation with erotic imagery, his visceral, unsentimental portrait of childhood alienation nevertheless aligns closer to the naturalism of Ken Loach’s Kes and Jean Eustache’s Mes petites amoureuses than the surrealism of his later films. Indeed, Bruno’s (Vincent Gasperitsch) initiation into his new […]
From the seemingly mundane (if logistically nightmarish) objective of documenting the annual mass exodus of migrant workers from industrial cities as they return home to their rural villages in time for the Chinese New Year, Lixin Fan poignantly captures the dissolution of family in the face of globalism, poverty, and disenfranchisement in Last Train Home. […]
With its baroque interiors and saturated compositions, Luca Guadagnino’s sprawling I Am Love recalls the melodramas of Luchino Visconti in its lush and operatic, if oddly clinical and overwrought treatise on passion, identity, and destiny. And like Visconti’s The Leopard, a majestic dinner party also foretells the end of a way of life: the retirement […]
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s previous film, Kinetta, an amateur film crew converges at a resort hotel in the off season to reenact accident and crime scenes, blurring the bounds between reality and staging in their obsessive attention to detail and complete immersion in their inscrutable project. In a sense, Dogtooth proves to be an extension of […]
In Sandrine Veysset’s Victor… Before It’s Too Late, social observation and whimsicality oddly – but seamlessly – converge into a bracing exploration of family, connection, and healing. From the opening sequence of an anxious Victor (Jérémy Chaix) staring out at mobile airplanes with both wistfulness and fear that segues into a shot of him running […]