Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan appears something like actual reality, half-planned and half-found.
Perhaps no director since Hitchcock has been quite this obsessed with glimpses and gazes.
At best, The Class is great reality TV.
The Northern Land is something like a bad Oliveira forgery.
Cassavetes is the acknowledged influence, and like Cassavetes, director Azazel Jacobs has a reverent sense for present, lived-in experience.
Eat, for This Is My Body is a stupid film by a smart man, for literally sees everything as black and white and legible.
Vanishing without a trace is always a promise and a threat in Olivier Assayas’s films.
Wonderful Town is contemplative cinema with nothing to contemplate.
Brillante Mendoza’s Foster Child is actually a home-movie tour de force.
The film is pitched somewhere between a music appreciation class and a modernist experiment attesting to art’s ability to ennoble the quotidian.
At least Arranged understands that its message is directed at naïve children.