A riot of heavy glances and portentous imagery, a near constant chorus of brooding strings and, in its latter, terminal stages, an excruciating program of narrative elongation that verges on the absurd.
The extended car ride sequence in Kinatay represents the dizzying peak of Mendoza’s filmmaking.
Patrice Chéreau may be among the working filmmakers the most attuned to the human body.
The film begins with a fair amount of promise as the filmmakers signal their commitment to exploring the possibilities of the three-character dynamic.
A testament to film’s documentary function to record moments of queasy immediacy as well as to Kimberly Reed’s thoughtful self-analysis.
Martin Scorsese’s film walks a fine line between institutional thriller and what-is-reality inquest.
The family exposé is by its nature a dicey proposition.
The most significant exception to Yang’s concern with the present day remains the much lauded but rarely seen A Brighter Summer Day.
Any Méliès is good Méliès, but there’s plenty here to stand on its own merits.
Even for those likely to be sympathetic to his point of view, Norman Finkelstein can be a difficult figure to embrace.
Detail and specificity of setting will only take you so far.
Only a running strand of low-fi humor, including a late Wild West-style beer-drinking showdown that nearly saves the day, keeps the project afloat.
There’s more to Akerman’s work in the ’70s than Jeanne Dielman, even if that film continues to loom large over the period.
Geralyn Pezanoski accepts the all-consuming importance of the man-canine relationships as a given.
Even apart from the film’s vaguely insane endorsement of love at all costs, there’s the fact that much of it is simply not very funny.
Mid-level Altman from the forgotten ’80s, a period that ought not to be forgotten entirely.
Altman imagines the army barracks as a hothouse environment where tensions and fears play out in oddly manic outburst.
Old Partner unfolds as an uncomfortably voyeuristic study in peasant-class misery.
The film posits an endlessly malleable universe whose objects can be remade nearly as fast as they’re destroyed.
Fashion designer Tom Ford seems determined to err not on the side of caution, but on that of aesthetic overload instead.