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New York Film Festival 2021

If ever the world needed to be reminded of cinema’s world-making possibilities, it’s now.

New York Film Festival 2021
Photo: Netflix

“Taken together, the movies in this year’s main slate are a reminder of cinema’s world-making possibilities,” said Dennis Lim, the New York Film Festival’s director of programing and chair of the main slate selection committee, in a statement last month accompanying the announcement of the films that will screen as part of the 59th edition of the festival. And if the world ever needed that possibility, it’s now.

Almost the entirety of the 32 features in the main slate enjoyed their world premiere earlier in the year at festivals the world over, from Sundance to Berlinale to Cannes to Toronto. In fact, the only world premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival will be Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which kicks off the festival on September 24. Also of note is that the film is the first that a Coen brother has made without the other’s involvement, and it marks the first time that Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand star opposite each other on screen.

No less hotly anticipated is Jane Campion’s first feature in over a decade, The Power of the Dog, the centerpiece selection, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, which will close the festival on October 10. The former bowed out of Cannes when Netflix refused to screen it out of competition, while the latter wasn’t completed in time. Both premiered in Venice earlier in the month to significant acclaim, with Campion winning the director prize and Penélope Cruz the actress trophy, solidifying them as major players heading into the awards season.

All but six of the films in the main slate have distribution, which is the same number with Neon’s stamp on them: Jonas Carpignano’s trilogy-capping, Calabria-set A Chiara, a gripping account of the after-effects of a father’s abandonment of his family; Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s poignant animated documentary Flee, about an Afghan refugee grappling with the traumas of his past; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, an eerily quiet reckoning with all the spirits that lurk beneath the façades of urban modernity; Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, a wistful fairy tale about a most mysterious bond between a mother and daughter; Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winner Titane, a full-throttle illustration of the death drive; and Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, a rom-com that may just restore your faith in the genre.

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Also returning to the festival with new films are Mia Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island), Bruno Dumont (France), Todd Haynes (The Velvet Underground), as well as Hamaguchi Ryûsuke and Hong Sang-soo, both with two films a piece: the former with Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the latter with In Front of Your Face and Introduction.

Among the festival’s noteworthy sidebars are Spotlight, a showcase of the season’s most anticipated and significant films (among them Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and Sean Baker’s Red Rocket); Currents, which seeks to place an emphasis on “new and innovative forms and voices,” as proven by such works as Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’s The Tsugua Diaries and Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene; and Revivals, a generous selection of digitally remastered, restored, and preserved films (among them John Carpenter’s Assault on Precint 13, Wendell B. Harris Jr. Chameleon Street, Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street, and Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher). Ed Gonzalez

For a schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, visit Film at Lincoln Center.



A Chiara

A Chiara (Jonas Carpignano)

A Chiara’s first section isn’t exactly devoid of drama, but its tension is at least atmospheric. Something haunts Chiara’s (Swamy Rotolo) joyfulness—a suspicion that the repressed will return with a vengeance. And the fear that she will eventually be hurt, or betrayed, is enough plot to make writer-director Jonas Carpignano’s film an immersive experience. But once it starts taking on the contours of a thriller, which is baked into everything from Claudio (Claudio Rotolo) evading the police to news of his criminal record being predictably read out by a television reporter, A Chiara starts going through the expected narrative motions in order to get to the requisite resolution. Chiara slips away from her almost documentary-like persona and assumes the more artificial position of a character. Diego Semerene

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Ahed’s Knee

Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid)

Nadav Lapid has never been averse to self-reflexivity, but as evinced by Ahed’s Knee—the filmmaker’s follow-up to his Golden Bear-winning Synonymes—he’s now more self-reflective than ever. The critique of Israeli nationalism that’s often the subtext of Lapid’s films erupts to the fore here—and at one point literally screamed at the camera in a long rant about the hopelessness surrounding the state of the country’s moral affairs. The film rails against the complicitly that the official-sanctioned Israeli culture compels with the inhumanities of its government, though it also warns against taking it at its word. Lapid uses his script to play a canny game with alter egos, frustrating any simplistic reading of the forceful language used by a character who would seem to be his most obvious double. Pat Brown



Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude)

Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is every bit as strange and overstuffed as its title. The film is a kind of fire sale of Jude’s observations on everything from life during the Covid-19 pandemic to Romania’s dark history of fascism. Its dominant theme is the socially constructed nature of obscenity, explored through the story of a school teacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), dealing with the potentially career-ending fallout that ensues after a raunchy sex tape she filmed with her husband is leaked online. This premise might have served as the basis for a mainstream sex farce—a point that’s winkingly acknowledged by the film’s subtitle, “A Sketch for a Popular Film”—but Jude takes it primarily as a jumping-off point for some playful formal experimentation and bitterly satirical jabs at Romanian society. Keith Watson



Benedetta

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)

Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta suggests a covert remake of the director’s 1995 trash masterpiece Showgirls, redressing the Vegas showgirls as late-Renaissance Italian nuns. Both films concern a woman who understands the power of her sex and weaponizes it to her advantage. Benedetta also shares a tone and, to some degree, a structure with Showgirls, as their irony-drenched comic sensibility clashes disconcertingly with a third-act betrayal that results in a rather distressing scene of sexual violence. The intrigue created by Verhoeven’s love of tonal clash and generalized profligacy doesn’t quite save Benedetta from feeling like it’s revealed its entire hand well before the credits roll, but while it’s hot, it’s hot. Brown



Bergman Island

Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve)

There are no apparitions in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, but it isn’t too far off base to describe this story about a filmmaking couple, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who make a pilgrimage to the island where Ingmar Bergman lived for many years as a ghost story. Bergman came to fervently believe in ghosts toward the end of his life, and it’s clear that his spirit still haunts Fårö, as well as the lives of Hansen-Løve’s characters. Given how directly Chris refracts her experiences on Färo into the fiction that she’s constructing, the film’s middle stretch can feel a little redundant as it progresses. But Hansen-Løve is merely setting up a finale that brings the various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head, and without sacrificing all the alluring ambiguities she’s built up to this point. Ultimately, her film suggests that there’s a way to reconcile oneself with the ghosts of cinema past. Brown

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Il Buco

Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammartino)

Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco is a docu-fiction hybrid that lovingly and patiently recreates a speleological expedition deep inside a remote sinkhole. From the surface, the titular hole appears as a scar on the picturesque Calabrian countryside, but as we’ll see through the filmmaker’s detailed observation of the spelunkers’ work, it extends deep into the Earth. Frammartino juxtaposes scenes of speleological exploration with shots of a wordless hermit who watches the crew from his elevated hillside perch. The man serves as a kind of surrogate audience member, but his presence also feels slightly contrived, particularly when he grows ill and is taken to a farmhouse where he slowly passes away. His death provides a metaphysical counterpoint to the end of the cavers’ expedition, which reaches its conclusion with the discovery of the hole’s walled-off bottom. All things must eventually come to an end, the film suggests—an accurate observation, to be sure, but far from profound. Watson



Drive My Car

Drive My Car (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Drive My Car taps into the storytelling potential of objects with an indelible intensity, but only up to a point. Initially, Hamaguchi has us forge connections through inference as we’re introduced to a beautiful cosmopolitan couple whose work-and-play rituals fill them with palpable satisfaction. The pleasures to be had in Drive My Car lie mostly in its first act, when the layers of the film unfold with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant. Hamaguchi infuses in us the drama of textures and mood long before he tells us who the characters are, where they’re going, and where they’ve been. Suitcases covered in travel stickers, naked lovers bristling against bedsheets, a clunky automobile zipping across the Tokyo expressways, or a dead woman fallen to the ground are all shot as refreshing reminders that even the most elusive of feelings, or ghostly of presences, need the physical world to manifest themselves meaningfully. Semerene



The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation

The First 54 Years (Avi Mograbi)

Avi Mograbi’s The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation undertakes the difficult task of outlining the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land since the Six-Day War in 1967. Rather than positioning his film as an in-depth examination of a conflict too complicated to fully cover even in a Ken Burns-sized opus, the Israeli Mograbi wisely limits his scope to the methodologies employed by his country as occupiers who gradually and meticulously normalized their presence in Gaza and the West Bank to the point that they could claim an inalienable right to the land itself. As a film explicitly interested in deconstructing the very calculated forms of escalation that one dominant nation—in both their military arsenal and political pull in the United Nations—has imposed on a far weaker one for decades, it’s a persuasive, economical dissection of events that sheds light on the grievances of the Palestinian people that have long fallen on deaf ears. Derek Smith



Flee

Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

Amin Nawabi, the pseudonymous subject of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee, is an enigma both to others and himself. Even as an adult with a successful career and a loving relationship, he’s still not quite ready to lay himself bare. We will come to understand that Amin’s reserved nature is both a product of his trauma and a self-preservation technique, and there’s no shortage of harrowing events in Amin’s past to process. But Rasmussen’s stylistic choices at times threaten to overpower the personalized dimensions of Amin’s story. The choice to render the contemporary scenes as cartoons was apparently motivated by the need to protect Amin’s identity, and it does help to create a continuity between his past life and his current existence. But Flee’s animation style is a bit too muted and minimalistic to capture the range of feeling we can detect in Amin’s voice, resulting in a film that flattens the subtleties of human expression and as such denies us a more empathic embrace. Watson

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France

France (Bruno Dumont)

There’s a scene in Broadcast News that hinges on Holly Hunter’s principled news producer discovering that William Hurt’s rising reporter, her lover, faked his tears for an interview with a rape victim. The naïveté of this moment has always been astonishing, suggesting that media insiders were just discovering that television news is partly showbiz, often requiring bullshit to grease the wheels of public interest. If such a scene was ridiculous in 1987, the notion of anyone having optimism to lose over the rapidly mutating media bloodsport of the modern age is entirely alien. Nevertheless, Bruno Dumont’s France similarly yet indecisively utilizes a TV personality’s crocodile tears as symbolic of the bad faith that pervades news discourse. Perhaps sensing that a satire of the media manipulation industry is almost predestined to be anachronistic, Dumont blurs the line between melodrama, critique, and broad comedy in an effort to cover his tracks. Despite its hefty, state-of-things title, France doesn’t add up to much, which is certainly part—but only part—of the filmmaker’s joke. Chuck Bowen



Futura

Futura (Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher)

Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Futura is attuned to the dreams and anxieties of people on the brink of adulthood. Journeying across Italy, the filmmakers interview farmers, students, actors, boxers, among others. And given the uniformity of the disillusionment that they capture, it’s almost as if they’re driving in circles. While the interviews cover a wide range of contexts, almost everyone has similar complaints. From Milan to Palermo, they speak of how there aren’t any jobs for them, that Italy is “asleep,” that it doesn’t care about its young people, and that the government is only interested in pensions and immigration issues. They also seem to agree that Italian schools are excellent. And it shows, as their eloquence and wit are disarming, and just as consistent as their hopelessness, which makes the whole scenario all the more heart-wrenching. Semerene



The Girl and the Spider

The Girl and the Spider (Ramon and Silvan Zürcher)

Given how scrupulously director Ramon Zürcher has structured The Girl and the Spider around the medium shot, it’s more than a little jarring when the audience gets a head-to-toe view of the film’s protagonist around the half-hour mark. The medium shot is to Zürcher what the two-shot is to Hong Sang-soo—a default formal strategy from which any and all deviations seem purposeful. Limiting our view and letting characters operate freely in the off-screen space has more than just visual implications in Zürcher’s enigmatic sophomore feature, which trickles out its story world in discrete blocks of sound and image and withholds a great deal of narrative detail. The spider of the title, which also makes a cameo in a number of scenes, proves an apt metaphor: Zürcher spins byzantine webs of audiovisual stimuli from an ultimately modest dramatic core, and not only is the larger narrative design unclear before it’s finally revealed, it’s easy to get stuck dwelling on the minutia along the way. Carson Lund



Hit the Road

Hit the Road (Panah Panahi)

Writer-director Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road traces a road trip that a family takes across a rugged Iranian landscape in their SUV. Inside the car sits a father (Hassan Madjooni) with a leg in plaster, his stoic wife (Pantea Panahiha), an older son who says nothing (Amin Simiar), and a rambunctious younger one (Rayan Sarlak). Then there’s the family dog, who also has an injured leg and is the only character here whose name we learn. Iranian cinema’s allure often stems from the deceptive simplicity of its elements. The car is often the literal vehicle that stitches the films’ bare bones together around a melancholy core. The choice of the automobile purposefully limits the mise-en-scène and narrative possibilities to a parabolic austerity. We see more of a situation that zigzags than a narrative that moves traditionally forward. Panahi taps into this trope but chooses one too many directions to follow. Without the constancy of melancholy, not much clicks into a coherent whole Semerene

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In Front of Your Face

In Front of Your Face (Hong Sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo’s In Front of Your Face is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives. Throughout this spritely and elegiac production, Hong lingers on details that most filmmakers would either take for granted and entirely disregard. Characters talk about whether to get coffee, a small stain on a dress becomes an existentialist symbol of control, and, of course, there’s a prolonged soju-drinking session with a blinkered male artist in which a few emotional cards are finally laid on the table. Hong’s gift resides in part in his ability to inform potentially tedious tangents with a rapturous and seemingly effortlessly achieved intensity. He returns to the same ground throughout his films and justifies the repetition, which becomes resonant in its own right. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder claimed to be doing, Hong is building a house—an interconnected series of films about the collision between day-to-day nonsense and private artistic realms. Bowen



Întregalde

Întregalde (Radu Muntean)

Radu Muntean’s Întregalde is a sharply drawn and subtle fable about the meaning of charity and the limits of altruism, and it finds the Romanian director far from the cosmopolitan, post-Ceaucescu Bucharest of his breakthrough drama, Tuesday, After Christmas. Like many of the canonical works of the Romanian New Wave, Muntean’s 2010 film wrung considerable tension from quotidian but irreconcilable domestic dramas. Though Întregalde quickly, and unexpectedly, evolves into something close to a genre exercise, it’s similarly dogged in its quest to illustrate the gaps between human values and human nature. With a neutral tone that isn’t judgmental but is nonetheless hyper-inquisitive and devastatingly witty, the film exposes the differences between doing good to feel good about yourself and doing good because simply because there’s no one else there to help. Christopher Gray



Introduction

Introduction (Hong Sang-soo)

It would be easy but shortsighted to dismiss Introduction as another collection of sketches by the prolific Hong Sang-soo. Every one of his films uncovers new emotional contours as Hong continues to mercilessly hone his aesthetic, and this one is no exception. Introduction was shot by Hong in the same kind of ghostly black-and-white as many of his other recent productions, and it finds him continuing to refine a sense of negative space that communicates gracefulness and inner turmoil. When characters stand or walk alone here, looking into a pocket of bright white sunshine or stepping into a reflective rain puddle, they momentarily slip into their own skin after intricate, implicitly combative verbal jousting with family and friends. Here, Hong continues to compress the distance between himself and his actors, capturing moments of unforgettable behavioral acuity, which he fuses with his stark, expressionistic, nearly Bergman-esque compositions. The result is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges and resonant dead ends and false starts. Bowen



Memoria

Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

If sound is a physical phenomenon then all that the voices of the past require to be heard is a receiver of sorts with storage capacity to bring them into the present. This is the philosophical terrain that Thai master of slow cinema Apichatpong Weerasethakul navigates with his first (kind-of) English-language feature, Memoria. A Scottish orchid farmer traveling in Colombia, Jessica gets caught up in an unraveling mystery that centers the eruption of the arcane and spiritual into the modern world—not unlike Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, only with a bit of a sci-fi, media-centric twist. In the film, Colombia and the Amazon jungle become akin to waking dreams, the characters moving though spaces as if in a kind of slumber and those spaces coming to seem disconnected from human activity. Again in a Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets. Brown

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Neptune Frost

Neptune Frost (Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman)

Neptune Frost thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of a past-, future-, and present-day Rwanda in the age of global communication. A staple of the musical format is the break in reality where characters freely express feelings that polite society tends to silence, but the characters here sing as a means of chafing against a global silence, demanding to be heard by the powers that continue to exploit Africa well after the supposed end of colonialism. At one point, Matalusa (Kaya Free) laments, “We do the work that is hidden behind their screens,” and later another character offers a pointed revision of that outlook by arguing: “We are not hidden. We are ignored.” Neptune Frost, for all its freewheeling visual ideas and complex politics surrounding its narrative, is direct and lucid about its characters’ needs for the outside world to not only recognize the toil that makes the luxuries of contemporary life possible, but to also be welcomed into it. Jake Cole



Parallel Mothers

Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers is haunted by absences, by how a country informs its citizens’ psyches on a granular level. Its central mystery involves the connection between a woman’s quest to recover the bones of ancestors who were murdered and mass-buried during the Spanish Civil War, and two new mothers’ attempts to make peace with their families. The cross-associations that Almodóvar weaves between these threads are startling, suggesting the ripple effects that are inherent in even casual interactions. The filmmaker creates a slipstream of history, art, architecture, and lineage, folding every element of his society effortlessly into one of his most robust and moving melodramas. Quite a bit happens in Parallel Mothers, and much of it doesn’t need to be revealed, except to say that Almodóvar continues to toy with notions of heritage and erasure. The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Almodóvar understands to be one in the same. Bowen



Passing

Passing (Rebecca Hall)

Coursing through every meticulously arranged frame of Rebecca Hall’s feature-length directorial debut, Passing, is a kind of sickened rage and psychological nuance that sets it apart from your average high-minded period film about race. In adapting Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel of the same name, Hall follows the author’s lead by depicting not so much the blatant prejudices of the time’s stifling racial barriers but the punishing wounds often self-inflicted by those who tried to cross those barriers. While hitting a couple moments somewhat on the nose—such as the scene in which Irene says, “We’re all passing for something or other”—Hall’s screenplay mostly avoids over-simplifying the conundrums that its characters find themselves in. Even when Passing takes an inevitably tragic turn, rather than indulging in old clichés about what happened when characters crossed what was then called “the race line,” it leaves room for ambiguity and humanity, precisely the things that the racist rules of 1920s America attempted to eradicate. Chris Barsanti



Petite Maman

Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma)

Petite Maman departs from Céline Sciamma’s last two feature-length directorial efforts in its comparative modesty. With none of the overt social messaging of Girlhood or the grand romance of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma’s precisely composed images and muted dialogue serve a more intimate story about the longing to connect with one’s mother outside the bounds of the parent-offspring relationship. Petite Maman indulges the same kind of fantasy as Back to the Future, answering the question of what it would be like to meet our parents at our own age—though it’s not overly concerned with temporal paradoxes or a high-stakes race to ensure one’s genesis. The film’s look at an impossible connection between a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother captures with wistful clarity the asynchrony that keeps us from getting to fully know our parents as people—fantasizing a scenario in which its main character can achieve an understanding that for many of us comes too late. Brown

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The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

Nobody is where they should be in The Power of the Dog, and everybody seems to be searching for something, somebody, or somewhere else. Set in 1925 Montana, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 book tracks the obsessions, miseries, and passions of a group of people who inhabit a cavernous house in the middle of a vast ranchland and make each other miserable until blood is finally shed. The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility. Ari Wegner’s richly high-gloss cinematography and Jonny Greenwood’s unusually conventional score contribute to what can feel like an overly staid package. But the rattling interpersonal tensions and lack of simple emotional payoffs point to something more complicated. Campion is concerned more with the pensive give and take between restless characters than story here. Still, she pulls the tragic conclusion together with a sharp dramatic reveal that builds on clues she carefully seeded earlier with all the elan of an ace Agatha Christie acolyte. Barsanti



Prayers for the Stolen

Prayers for the Stolen (Tatiana Huezo)

Tatiana Huezo brings her documentarian’s eye to the depiction of Prayers for the Stolen’s milieu, capturing moments that speak to both the scourge of the cartels and the rustic pleasures of lives carved in the rugged terrain of the Sierra Madre. As in Tempestad, Huezo isn’t interested in the gory details of cartel brutality, only what it feels like to live in the shadow of terror. Under her quietly expressionistic direction, even moments of childhood frivolity are enveloped by encroaching danger. That sense of an omnipresent but largely unseen threat is also conveyed by a rich sound design in which the chirping of birds, the hissing of bugs, and the howling of the wind mingle with the distant sound of gunshots and speeding trucks. In one of the film’s most indelible scenes, two characters listen to the sounds of the night, trying to identify the moo of a cow and estimating its exact location. This is no mere game but also a kind of survival training. Watson



The Souvenir Part II

The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg)

Joanna Hogg always planned for The Souvenir to have a sequel, and for it to concern the mending of a heart rent by pain. But while The Souvenir Part II is as delicately observed and thoroughly enrapturing as its predecessor, it’s also about how people come to understand themselves through the things they make. Much of the film follows Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne) as she goes about realizing her thesis project, which is being produced in parallel to the garishly pretentious musical being made by her classmate, Patrick (Richard Ayoade). In the end, Julie’s film, assembled from her memories of the tragic relationship depicted in The Souvenir, hardly seems more fully formed than Patrick’s scattershot musical, but its roots in her experiences give it an undeniable life that his project lacks. A film of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor, The Souvenir Part II is a vital tribute to art as a necessary component of life. Brown



Titane

Titane (Julia Ducournau)

Julia Ducournau’s Titane expands on the filmmaker’s interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration. It also ratchets up Raw’s combination of body-horror explicitness and art-film abstraction, making for a wild ride through a female serial killer’s techno-sexuality that would make J.G. Ballard blush. The film’s exploration of corporeal transformations both willed and unwelcome—based in the alchemy of flesh, gender, and the desire for inorganic hardness—makes for some imagery that taps into deep anxieties about the uncanniness of inhabiting the fluid-filled sack that we call a body. But the opening scenes depicting the genesis of Alexia’s (Agathe Rousselle) fixation and her initial rampage of eroticized violence possess an energy and inventiveness that the remainder never matches, despite its consistently rich, fiery look and fleshy sound design. Titane can accelerate from zero to 60 pretty quickly, but sometimes it feels like it’s just cruising. Brown

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The Tragedy of Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen)

For his first solo directorial effort, Joel Coen turns to “the Scottish play,” a.k.a. The Tragedy of Macbeth, William Shakespeare’s enduring tale of power run amok. The resulting film is, for better and worse, and despite the absence of his brother Ethan, a pure Coen concoction. This is evident from the vertiginous opening shot, in which three ominous black birds fly across a stark white background, all sense of grounding and perspective obliterated. In this moment, you may wonder if we’re looking up, down, or merely gazing, as so many of the play’s characters do, into an abstract void of horrors. The rub, in the end, comes down to the pairing of Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. The words tumble out of their mouths with a pleasing rhythm but also with a distinct lack of revelation. Absent here is the compulsive carnality that drives them both—the murderous lust for power that dovetails with their lust for each other, and which proves their mutual undoing. Keith Uhlich



Unclenching the Fists

Unclenching the Fists (Kira Kovalenko)

Set in the industrial town of Mizur in the North Caucasus, Kira Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman’s body, but most exceptionally, it’s built on the disorienting contradictions that make up family relations. That is, the imbrication of aggression with affection, the strange yet banal craving to both kill, sometimes literally, and care for one’s tyrannical father. The disturbing ambiguities of familial ties is rendered palpable in a sequence at a nightclub as Ada (Milana Aguzarova) dances to a Chechen ballad with her brothers. There’s a subtly incestuous desperation to the way one brother snatches her away from the other, as if trying to eliminate the other in order to keep Ada to himself. Eventually, the competition ends with a group embrace in the middle of the dance floor, a sort of silent pact of love, after which Ada vomits in her mouth. In the context of endless trauma such as Ada’s, the sequence suggests that even gentle forms of affection are too unwieldy, too unprecedented, for this young woman to bear. Semerene



The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes)

Todd Haynes’s documentary The Velvet Underground begins with an epigraph: “Music fathoms the sky.” While Charles Baudelaire is mentioned early on as an influence on Lou Reed’s songwriting, there’s no explicit working out of what this citation of a 19th-century French poet has to do with a band of American avant-garde ’60s rockers. Haynes simply trusts us to trace a line between those four words and the Velvet Underground’s narcotic, poetic sound. This masterful collage of a film overwhelms with its aesthetic possibilities. Haynes splits the screen into multiple panels, incorporates clips from the burgeoning avant-garde cinema of the ’60s, and overloads the soundtrack with the Velvet Underground’s often cacophonous rock experiments. Haynes’s circulating aesthetic currents work in confluence to emphasize how the music of the Velvet Underground summed up, and in a way that no one else could, the totality of the times in the artistic capital of the United States. It fathomed the unfathomable depths of a roiling culture in a process of rapid transformation. Brown



Vortex

Vortex (Gaspar Noé)

Resignation to fate is the dominant affect of Gaspar Noé’s Vortex. Other films about the onset and advancement of dementia have rarely been as steadfastly bleak or as full of futile despair as this tale of an elderly couple whose bond is dissolved by the disease. Noé uses split screen to represent the divide between the characters, and in the opening minutes of Vortex, the filmmaker shows us the moment that the disease comes between them by having the black bar that will separate the screen for the rest of the film slowly inch down the middle of the frame as the couple lies in bed. The film takes place in a universe indifferent and unresponsive to its characters’ hopes—in which, at one point, plans are literally flushed down the toilet. In other words, it’s set in a world emptied of the usual sentimental pieties about aging and death. As the possibility not only of a happy ending, but of any real resolution, of any reconciliation with the fact of death that we might hope the characters will make, becomes remote, the film evokes that familiar but unshakeable cliché that everybody dies alone. Brown

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What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze)

Writer-director Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a city symphony composed in a digressive key, an offbeat epic informed by a reverence for the past and a delicate wariness toward the future. Set in the ancient Georgian town of Kuitsai, where history seems to smile on traditions both new and old, the film stages a meet-cute soon thwarted by an instance of uncanny magic and treats that disappointment like a minor event, an opportunity to gaze at one’s home with a fresh perspective. But as rigorous and striking as the film’s images and sounds are, Koberidze’s eagerness to explore nearly everyone and everything in the frame can be wearying. A late subplot involving a crew of filmmakers working on a movie about couples manages to rekindle some curiosity about the connection between and potential fate of the thwarted lovers at the start, but by this point it has long become clear that the film is content to proceed on its own idiosyncratic wavelength, marveling at the mundane in a tenor that’s admirably romantic, if not quite infectious. Gray



Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a collection of three shorts, all concerning the unmooring after-lives of faded relationships. In its very title, the first episode, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” conjures the thin line between rapture and melancholia that governs the film as a whole. The seeds of romantic exploitation that exist in the episode reach full bloom in the second and most daring one, “Door Wide Open,” which concerns two, maybe three overlapping stories of intimate gamesmanship. The third, “Once Again,” doesn’t have the intricacy of the first two, but it gains in power upon reflection, enriching the rest of the film. If past relationships are such easily alterable realities in retrospect, homes to which we can never return, perhaps they can also be altered in the mind to the benefit of all involved. At its heart, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling. Bowen



The Worst Person in the World

The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is a cinematic disarmament campaign, a charismatic negotiator arrived to make a deal with our rom-com-unfriendly times and dismantle our time-honed defenses against sentiment. In what could be called a bait and switch if it didn’t seem so fluid and effortless, the film’s levity of spirit at first belies, then ends up accentuating, deeper themes about navigating a world in flux and a life you only get to live once. The film strikes many familiar chords about life, love, and loss, but proves that much insight and pleasure can still be gained by simply rearranging them a bit. Certainly there’s an honesty in its exploration of a woman who deeply loves two men, and a dedication in its identification with Julie’s (Renate Reinsve) complex position as a 21st-century woman, that are relatively unique. But if some films look to revivify a formula rather than reinvent the wheel, The Worst Person in the World may be the prime example of how to restore fun, significance, and even a little bit of sex to the well-worn terrain of the romantic comedy. Brown

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