A devastating portrayal of how personal trauma and social alienation can lead to national tragedy, “You Resemble Me” attempts to look beyond the sensationalized headlines to find the humanity in Hasna Aït Boulahcen.  As a journalist for Vice, director Dina Amer reported on the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 and was on the scene when the attack’s mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, died with Hasna in an explosion as police closed in. 

Continue reading ‘You Resemble Me’: A Devastating Portrayal Of Personal Trauma & Social Alienation [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

A poetic meditation on film, history, and loss, “Three Minutes – A Lengthening” gives a glimpse into a lost world and then unpacks just how much can be learned from that brief fragment.  While on a grand tour of Europe in 1938, David Kurtz, a Polish-American man, traveled to Nasielsk, the town of his birth, and brought with him a 16mm camera filled with Kodachrome, a novelty at the time.  He took three minutes of footage there that was embedded in a larger film of his travels and, like many such films, it sat forgotten in a basement for years. Around 2009, David’s grandson Glenn Kurtz rediscovered the footage and recognized that the once-ordinary film was now an extraordinary historical document – the only remaining visual record of a Jewish community that was annihilated in the Holocaust. 

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch

Director Bianca Stigter takes the 1938 footage and uses it as a prism, looking at every detail to see how much of prewar Nasielsk can be exhumed.

Continue reading Giving Life to a Lost Community in ‘Three Minutes – A Lengthening’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

The story of a Swiss banker traveling Argentina during the junta, “Azor” takes place in the cloistered world of private banking.  A world one is often born into, with special codes of conduct and dialect, private bankers prefer to operate out of public view – that’s why the banks endure and build fortunes over centuries while their criminal clients may rise and fall.  Azor itself is a code word meaning “to not say too much” or “to keep one’s cards close,” a trait that the film and its protagonist so excel at, viewers will be kept guessing until the last moment. 

READ MORE: ‘Liborio’: Nino Martínez Sosa’s Debut Is A Moving Drama About Belief [ND/NF Review]

Yvan de Wiel  (Fabrizio Rongione) is a third-generation Swiss banker traveling to Argentina for the first time after the disappearance of his partner, Rene Keys.

Continue reading ‘Azor’: Andreas Fontana’s Debut Is A Fascinating Look At Wealth & Power Through Conversation [ND/NF Review] at The Playlist.

“Liborio” invites viewers to the birth of a religion and asks them if they would believe. Based on a historical figure, albeit one with the dimensions of a folk hero, “Liborio” is set in the countryside of the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century. After being lost in a torrential storm and thought dead, a man (Vicente Santos) is found alive days later. He informs his community he has been to heaven and returned with a message to save the people.  He is reborn as Liborio.         

Summer 2021 Preview: Over 50 Movies To Watch

While his resurrection occurs earlier in his story, Liborio is a remarkably Christ-like figure whose profile in his community grows with a series of miracles, such as saving a child.  Liborio preaches a simple and positive creed—out with the evil and in with the good—to his rural followers. He is a benevolent leader, never trying to fight, but only to keep his community fed. Despite this, like Christ, he eventually runs afoul of the powers that be through little fault of his own, with the United States Marines playing the part of the Romans. 

READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2021

“Liborio” is the feature directing debut of Nino Martínez Sosa, a Dominican-born Spaniard with extensive experience as a film editor. While the story of Liborio could be interpreted into a variety of genres, Sosa’s priority with the film isn’t plot or politics as much as putting viewers into the heads of Liborio’s followers.  As in the Gospels, the story isn’t told in the prophet’s words but through the eyes of various followers.  Over and over, we see characters gaze at Liborio, the dance of faith and doubt in their eyes, trying to decide whether or not they’re witnessing the miraculous.

Continue reading ‘Liborio’: Nino Martínez Sosa’s Debut Is A Moving Drama About Belief [ND/NF Review] at The Playlist.

Road movies prime their audience to expect the unexpected – part of the point of the genre is for the protagonist’s expectations to be thwarted and for their journey to take a few extra twists and turns along the way.  “Bipolar” takes this tendency to an extreme, with a protagonist so open to chasing new whims that it’s impossible to predict what might be happening in ten minutes, let alone by the end of the film. 

Continue reading ‘Bipolar’: A Lobster-Loving Road Trip across China [ND/NF Review] at The Playlist.

A consummate man of letters, Jorge Luis Borges frequently receives the vague honorific of being a ‘writer’s writer,” often a fancy way of saying that his work is too complicated to adapt to film. Borges’ fascination with symbols and language, our imperfect tools for conceiving the world, manifested in stories where literary sleight of hand turns the mundane inside out to find the miraculous, where maps overtake the territory they represent and one walks in labyrinths without end.

Continue reading ‘Aleph’: A Borges-Inspired Odyssey Around the Globe [ND/NF Review] at The Playlist.

“The Truffle Hunters” takes viewers deep in the forests of Northern Italy to watch as elderly men and their indispensable dogs participate in the tradition of sniffing out the elusive white Alba truffle.  Beloved by gourmet chefs, the truffle’s rarity drives prices sky-high, even as the subjects of the film maintain the old ways of hunting, free of technology, relying on their own memories and a cranky sense of secrecy.  Like many who spend hours alone in the woods, their character tends to the eccentric, but to step away from the anxieties of 2020 and spend time in their irascible company is a tonic for the soul, a tranquil visit to a vanishing way of life attuned to nature. 

Continue reading ‘The Truffle Hunters’: A Beautiful, Immersive Search For Flavor In The Forests Of Italy [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

As Hollywood tries to balance the enormous gender disparity among directors, many critics and audiences are looking back with added respect on past works of female filmmakers, trying to reframe traditional notions of film history by focusing on different perspectives.  One film that perfectly encapsulates the difference a female perspective can make is 1985’s “Smooth Talk,” whose new restoration is being celebrated among the revivals of the 58th New York Film Festival. 

Continue reading ‘Smooth Talk’ & The Dark Side Of Attraction: Unpacking Female Perspectives In The Laura Dern-Starring Overlooked ’85 Classic [NYFF] at The Playlist.

With the indispensable aid of his widow and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento, the prolific Raúl Ruiz has given the world another film from beyond the grave.  That might seem strange for some directors, but this partnering of living and dead is right on brand for the esoteric exile, whose films always operated in liminal spaces, obscuring the difference between dream and reality, night and day, conscious and unconscious.  “The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror,” officially co-directed by Sarmiento and Ruiz (who passed in 2011), is the completion of footage shot by Ruiz in 1967 for what would have been his debut, but instead sat unfinished due to lack of funding for sound and was forgotten after Ruiz’s exile in 1973. 

Continue reading ‘The Tango Of The Widower’: Nightmares Come To Life In Raúl Ruiz’s Rediscovered First Film [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Like most aspects of life, the New York Film Festival looks a little different this year, switching to a mostly virtual format in light of the pandemic. While this will limit the chances for the film community to gather in-person, it’s still a joyful time for film lovers to unite virtually to celebrate the world’s best films after a lost summer of moviegoing and luckily, the festival’s opening night film, Steve McQueen’s “Lover’s Rock,” is a portrait of a joyful community, a feast for the evocation of the senses of a wild house party of West Indians in 1980 London. 

READ MORE: ‘Lover’s Rock’: Steve McQueen’s Dance-Filled ‘Small Axe’ Entry Is Surprisingly Tender [NYFF Review]

“Lover’s Rock” kicked off the 58th New York Film Festival yesterday evening, and to commemorate the occasion, the film’s director and stars Amarah-Jae St.

Continue reading Director Steve McQueen & Cast Discuss ‘Lover’s Rock’: “An Image of Freedom” [NYFF] at The Playlist.

“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Baydarov.  With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Baydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.  “In Between Dying” is the story of one epochal day in the life of Davud (Orkhan Iskandarli), a young man who constantly dreams of finding his ‘real’ family, a hypothetical wife and child who will understand him and bring him a sense of fullness.  His constant aspiration to an idealized existence makes him alienated from his own life, in which he grouchily shares a small house with his mother. 

READ MORE: 2020 Venice Film Festival Preview: All The Must-See Films To Watch

Davud’s fateful day starts, appropriately, in a cemetery overlooking Baku.  Davud kills a man after hearing an insult, mere feet away from an underworld leader, and flees, inaugurating a day of strange, symbolic encounters in which Death is never far behind him.  While the exact details of each episode differ, each shares a pattern of an abused or forgotten woman seeking a form of liberation from male violence or neglect, from a rabid woman who has been chained and beaten by her father to a woman fleeing the alter of an arranged marriage.

Continue reading ‘In Between Dying’: Fleeing Death And Finding Love In Azerbaijan [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

“Holler” is not the first film to chronicle the human toll of the flight of industry from the American Rust Belt to China and other countries abroad, but it might be the most direct.  “Holler” makes the subtext text by focusing on an Ohio group of scrappers, crews illegally stripping abandoned old factories and institutional buildings for raw metal that can be sold to Asian buyers. Writer-director Nicole Riegel uses this conceit, with expressive shots of breaking into haunted factories to rip copper from the walls, as an effective cinematic representation of the economic forces that have torn apart these communities. 

Continue reading ‘Holler’: Jessica Barden Shines In A Drama About Scavenging The American Dream [Review] at The Playlist.

Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke – at his height, David Bowie burned through identities like cigarettes, showcasing his wild theatricality and huge range of interests. “Stardust” is a fictionalized portrayal of Bowie just before he decides to don those masks, when his eclecticism is a hurdle, not an asset and writer/director Gabriel Range has as much to say about the artistic process and growing from failure as he does about Bowie specifically.

Continue reading Bowie Before Ziggy: Bowie Behind the Mask in ‘Stardust’ [Review] at The Playlist.

Please Note: “Critical Thinking” was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. With the express consent of the representatives of the filmmakers, we present the review of the film here.

Trying to win over reluctant students to the game of chess, high school teacher Mario Martinez tells them that there is no more level playing field than a chessboard – “Chess is the great equalizer!” His students at Miami Jackson believe the only way out of their barrio is through crime or football, but Mr.

Continue reading ‘Critical Thinking’: Conquering The Chessboard In John Leguizamo’s Directorial Debut [Review] at The Playlist.

A quietly powerful portrait of a young man forced to make impossible decisions to try to live decently in a landscape torn apart by forces far larger than himself, “The Evening Hour” is both an empathetic and sobering drama. Taking place in a mostly forgotten corner of Appalachia dominated by coal mining and rampant opioid use, “The Evening Hour” is the story of Cole Freeman (Philip Ettinger), who by day tenderly takes care of the elderly and by night deals prescription drugs according to his own moral code.  Director Braden King, working from a novel by Carter Sickels, spends the rest of the film showing the complexity of Cole’s code and how the return of an old friend to his small town, Terry Rose (Cosmo Jarvis), pushes that code to its breaking point. 

READ MORE: Here Are Our Most Anticipated Films from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival

Most movies portraying the drug economy envision it as an outside force that must be avoided at all costs, but to the characters in “The Evening Hour,” it’s as totally pervasive as the air they breath; every character is somehow affected by it and a young man like Cole must live his life in relation to it somehow.

Continue reading ‘The Evening Hour’: A Compassionate Drug Dealer Tries to Survive in Appalachia [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

Agnes Varda sadly passed away earlier this year at age 90, and this year’s New York Festival is not only dedicated to her but includes one of her films in the main slate. “Varda By Agnes” represents something few artists are lucky enough to have – the last word on one’s own career. Cobbled together from personal lectures, clips from her films, and some new material, “Varda By Agnes” summarizes the filmmaker’s sixty-plus years making art and reflects on her ideas and experiences in a playful, engaging manner.

Continue reading ‘Varda By Agnes’: A Charming Reflection On Life And Art [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Filmmaker Angela Schanelec is an acquired taste. Her latest, “I Was At Home, But…” sees her continue to hone her highly unique, emotionally oblique, and gently radical style, which frustrates some with its lack of a unitary “meaning,” but delights others for the multiplicity of possible meanings that “lack” engenders. Schanelec is often thought of in the Berlin School, but her latest film eschews that group by minimizing any specifically German aspects of the setting, instead, exploring more universal notions of the domestic; likewise the contemporary is minimized in favor of the classical, finding frequent reference points in both Shakespeare and old master paintings.

Continue reading ‘I Was At Home, But…”: Angela Schanelec’s Enigmatic Domestic Portrait [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Oliver Laxe’s new film “Fire Will Come” has a fitting and powerful title. It’s both an immutable truth in certain regions and a portent of things to come, depending on the speaker it could read as wisdom or a threat. Laxe’s film uses a dreamy minimalism to explore that most fundamental conflict of man versus nature, but also the tensions of a man struggling against his own nature.

Continue reading ‘Fire Will Come’: Oliver Laxe’s Latest Is A Mesmerizing Meditation On Man And Nature [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Bertrand Bonello’s most famous film, “House of Tolerance,” showed his affinity for collapsing the supposed distance between the past and present, proving to his audience we haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think. His last film, the controversial “Nocturama,” a fantasia of terrorism and capitalism intertwined, proved he was unafraid to explore hot button issues using both genre techniques and art film bravado.

Continue reading ‘Zombi Child’: Bertrand Bonello Stylishly Unearths The Colonialist Tensions Of The Zombie Mythos [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Perhaps no director better portrays the passage of time than Martin Scorsese, who has set films in five different centuries and usually tells stories that span decades, not days.  So when his latest film, “The Irishman”— another mobster drama, but this time with more spiritual depth— starts with a burst of nostalgic ’50s music, the audience is prepared to be transported to the past. Instead, the camera moves back to reveal the setting is the present day in a nursing home—and not a particularly nice one— where Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) sits alone, trapped in the past, with only memories and guilt to keep him company.

Continue reading ‘The Irishman’: Martin Scorsese Crafts A New Gangster Epic, With A Deeper Sense Of Soul & Morality [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Films have had a love affair with crime dating back over a century, but the misdeeds showcased are usually a flashy kind that’s grown rare in reality – gangsters, gunplay, and getaways. However, since the financial collapse of 2008, there’s been a realization that white-collar crime often shapes our world to a greater extent, and a subsequent effort by filmmakers has been made to explore more lowkey, opaque financial crimes. White-collar crime proves both the making and unmaking of the title character in Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj’s latest, “The Moneychanger,” a character study of Humberto Brause (Daniel Hendler), a bumbling banker who keeps money flowing for criminals and dictators in 1970s South America.

Continue reading ‘The Moneychanger’: A White-Collar Criminal Gets In Over His Head In Federico Veiroj’s Latest [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

It’s not usually a good sign when people begin whispering about a director’s cut of a film while the original is still in theaters, but luckily, when Ari Aster took the stage at Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies XII to introduce his director’s cut of “Midsommar,” he explained that the extended running time is what prevented him and A24 from releasing this version in theaters. Aster’s director’s cut, coming in at 171 minutes, as opposed to the theatrical version’s 147 (he teased/threatened the audience by mentioned a four hour work cut), does not reorient the story or provide more outrageous violence or scares, but rather, it provides a more complete picture of the twisted fairy tale.

Continue reading Ari Aster’s ‘Midsommar’ Director’s Cut Adds Depth, Not Scares, To His Beautiful Fairy Tale Nightmare [Review] at The Playlist.

As rich as the field of documentary is, the realities of filmmaking usually prevent films from achieving the same intimacy, fluidity, depth, and scope as classic written memoirs. With Nick Broomfield’s “Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love,” the stars have aligned, with the perfect match of filmmaker and subject, a fortuitous discovery of lost footage, and a narrative spanning a lifetime, to create a film that not only embodies the best of the written memoir but is even richer because it can include musical performances and wonderfully evocative period footage.

Continue reading ‘Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love’ Is A Beautiful, Poignant Look At Love And Loss In A Bohemian Paradise [Review] at The Playlist.

Few cultural figures are so well known, yet fundamentally mysterious and unknowable, like Bob Dylan, which is probably why the music icon is such an irresistible subject for documentarians. Dylan’s career seems designed to frustrate classifiers and analysts – an eternal willingness to torch the past, reject your expectations, abandon what works with audiences, cross boundaries, and invent new personas, accompanied by openly fabricating about his life and intentions.

READ MORE: ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ Trailer: Martin Scorsese’s New Doc Covers Bob Dylan & The Most Rebellious Tour Ever

In some of his on-screen appearances, such as D.A.

Continue reading ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’: Martin Scorsese Embraces The Slippery Truths & Fictions Of Bob Dylan In Another Terrific Documentary [Review] at The Playlist.

After making his last two films in Britain and America, writer-director Ritesh Batra returns to India for his latest, “Photograph,” a gentle and nostalgic romantic comedy set in Mumbai. “Photograph” is a film of reconciliation; as much as they seek a significant other, the characters seek to find a balance between tradition and modernity, family and self, image and reality. While the premise may sound broad, in reality, Batra veers away from genre clichés, abstaining from easy laughs and prominent displays of emotion in favor of a meditative tone focusing on the characters’ inner lives.

Continue reading ‘Photograph’: Reconciling Romance and Family in Mumbai [Review] at The Playlist.