In a scene that occurs midway through Jacques Rivette’s 36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak, former circus performer turned textile designer, Kate (Jane Birkin) returns to Paris with a batch of fabrics that she has dyed during a visit to her family’s provincial circus and tries to match the color of the swatches to a Pantone […]
In a way, Bullet in the Head continues to push the level of alienation created in Jaime Rosales’s earlier films, The Hours of the Day (shot from the perspective of a serial killer) and Solitary Fragments (shot from the parallel perspectives of a terrorist attack survivor and members of an estranged family), this time, to […]
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 […]
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 […]