Jessica Hausner is less interested in historical revisionism than mining this real-life tragedy for its existential thrust.
By the time it explicitly references its fairy-tale atmosphere, the air has gone out of this meticulously prepared soufflé.
It crafts its meandering, unobtrusively utopian worldview in such all-enveloping fashion that it feels almost incongruous once actual violence does rear its head.
Girlhood is so keyed to the minutiae of its teenage protagonists’ lives, it’s as if the film can’t stop itself from behaving like they do.
Hitoshi Matsumoto’s set pieces follow their own insane, unstoppable logic, with each new twist yielding its own outré surprises.
The film functions as an effortlessly comprehensive institutional portrait and an open-form essay on the very image itself.
It’s hard to recall a film so immensely and reductively in thrall to the work of another director.
The film blossoms into a breezily utopian depiction of a ménage á trois whose entirely matter-of-fact presentation sets up an intriguing dissonance.
Unlike many of its similarly scaled brethren, the Sarajevo Film Festival is very much at one with its host city: equal parts up-and-coming and garrulous, and the product of oft-divergent influences.
The Locarno competition got back on track and then some with the arrival of Pedro Costa’s long-awaited Horse Money.
It’s no wonder that film festivals are schizophrenic creatures, given the number of different functions they have to perform simultaneously.
The tiny Kino Otok – Isola Cinema Festival makes a very convincing argument for less is more.