Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985) Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, 2016) Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957) Chilly Scenes of Winter (Joan Micklin Silver, 1979) Neighbouring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012) Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
MUBI: —On Body and Soul: Ildikó Enyedi’s film uses the funniest, most tortured set-up possible to arrive at a beautiful contrivance: two lonely, lovelorn characters are both having the same dream when they sleep at night. What follows is an odd romance, leading up to a scene which in all truth made me break out […]
The dedication of 1917, which appears moments after the final scene closes, reads as follows: ‘For Lance Corporal Alfred H. Mendes 1st Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps., who told us stories.’ That final clause is meant to hit like emotional shrapnel. Who told us stories. But who retells these stories is a question worth asking; […]
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006) The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969) Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987) Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978) Afternoon (Angela Schanelec, 2007)
That Uncut Gems is first-person, present-tense, active-voice cinema shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s seen Heaven Knows What or Good Time, the Safdie brothers’ last two films: but what should be surprising, or at least is to me, is the plantiveness of their newest. It’s most obviously detectable in the score, by Daniel Lopatin, […]
There’s an honest pleasure at work in Michel Gondry’s diverting animated documentary, the subject of which is a series of conversations with the linguist, political activist, and philosopher Noam Chomsky. Gondry’s doodles and figures are representations, or visualisations, of Chomsky’s ideas: occasionally the director gets in something of a muddle, but he’s unfailingly self-deprecating, and […]
The cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of stories growing out from and intruding upon other stories. In his debut, Mysterious Object at Noon, the director combines fiction and documentary to indulge in a Surrealist exercise, an exquisite corpse game, in which one story is appended to the end of another without attention being paid […]
MUBI: —Leviathan: I remember being cratered by Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film, its helpless and hopeless story of a family displaced and destroyed by a confluence of church and state corruption. The director’s self-seriousness serves the material (and its attendant Book of Job underscoring) better than it does his subsequent Loveless. —Vertigo: Hitchcock’s essential document about the […]
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel is, among many things, a superb act of criticism. Where the novel itself and its previous adaptations (cinematic, televisual) begin with Meet Me In St. Louis-style familial contentment, with ironies and arguments to be contended with along the way, eventually succumb to life’s dissolutions and separations until […]
A movie which labels itself an ‘anti-hate satire’ is already not starting on the best of terms—but there was no way of knowing the depths of awfulness it would plumb. Taika Waititi’s mirthless and mawkish sixth film tries to tell the story of ten-year-old Johannes Betzler (Roman Griffin Davies), a fanatical Hiter youth initiate, nicknamed […]
