Tag: newyorkfilmfestival2019

As usual, the film is stunning to look at. Every frame is a work of art. Greatly aided by Leonardo Simões' cinematography and João Gazua and Hugo Leitão's sound work, the film gives the lives of its inhabitants the poeticism they deserve.

A puzzle piece that is never solvable, we instead concentrate on gestures and details inside the frame, in compensation for the lack of dialogue. It's that fragmentary images and colors that we play around our heads long after we leave the theater to make sense of it. Even more so than Godard's, Schanelec's cinema concentrates on the 'visual' part of the medium. It is the best kind of cinema I can think of.

Expertly weaving the current headlines of marine disasters and the ghost story with the female solidarity twist, 'Atlantics' has all the right ingredient to be a success story of a small art film breakthrough, recalling 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.'

The latest social-realist drama from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, starring Idir Ben Addi, Othmane Moumen, and Myriem Akheddiou, is well-intentioned, but unfortunately has little to say about Islamist radicalization.

'Zombi Child' digs deeper into hasty western appropriation of everything non-European, non-Anglo American culture. It disregards the cultural, historical, ethnographical significance of the origins of a zombie in exchange for sensationalism. Narcisse's journey back home is more interesting story here.

Certainly different from any other Desplechin film I have watched over the years, but no less intriguing. The love he has for his hometown and its inhabitants are undoubtedly palpable. Desplechin is a master storyteller and humanist. The film is a very moving experience.

Yet it is not as taut as 'Black Coal Thin Ice.' It sets up the motion nicely, but it doesn't have a momentum to follow through its 113-minute running time. Watch it for its beauty. Watch it for atmosphere. The film is still well worth the ticket.

The film works, thanks largely to Tom mercier's physical as well as verbal, at times verging on slapstick level on both counts. The film is often hilarious and at times poignant and filled with manic energy. Shai Goldman's handheld camera work is aces also.

Like most of Serra's work, there is a hint of parody in these shenanigans. I mean, it's actors in wigs stroking themselves in the woods in a movie called 'freedom'. I think with Liberté, Serra reached the new height in his formalist approach to costume dramas.