There’s a small but revealing moment early in Sound of Metal, Darius Marder’s fiction feature debut. When our protagonist is offered help from a faith-based initiative, he reflexively refuses it on the grounds that he is “very much not religious,”...
When a filmmaker develops a style as distinct and seemingly simplistic as Pedro Costa’s and when that style proves effective, why should they bother making any major changes to it? Vitalina Varela is recognizable as a Costa film from the...
As a writer and director of motion pictures, Armando Iannucci has so far stuck to the absurd brutality of politics, both the modern day, lightly fictionalized kind (In the Loop) and the historical kind (The Death of Stalin). These are...
If you’ve seen a film by Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence), you will largely know what to expect from his newest, About Endlessness. Once again, the...
Assuming it doesn’t take too long for the shock to wear off that Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius) has, along with co-director Juliano Dornelles, made an unabashed, committed, gory genre movie, it should very quickly become apparent that, for...
Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child is a fictionalized retelling of the account of Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man who claimed to have been given a poison in 1962 that caused him to appear dead and then “resurrected” by men who enslaved...
Portraiture is one of the oldest, and therefore most conventional, artistic pursuits. And much of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is concerned with the creation of that traditionalist style of painting. Yet, when we see the work...
The opening titles of Agnès Varda’s final film, Varda by Agnès, are backdropped by stills from her films; there are beaches, gleaners, couples in the throes of happiness, etc. So, if you didn’t know beforehand, you’d realize pretty quickly that...