“He’s not only who he is at home,” the friend of a Korean filmmaker tells the director’s daughter in Hong Sang-soo’s latest film. But “who he is at home” is at the heart of what “Walk Up” is all about. Structurally ingenious, with each of the film’s vignettes set on a different story of a Seoul apartment building, “Walk Up” follows another Hong-like filmmaker, Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) into different homes, which offer in turn different versions of who he is, or could be.

Continue reading ‘Walk Up’ Review: Hong Sangsoo Delivers A Delicate Portrait Of Age & Artistic Pursuit [NYFF] at The Playlist.

Albert Serra has up to now been known for his revisionist period films, which include prankishly unconventional treatments of Don Quixote (“Honor of the Nights,” 2006), Casanova (“The Story of My Death,” 2013) and Louis XIV (“The Death of Louis XIV,” 2016).  With “Pacifiction,” he makes his first film with a contemporary setting—and made his debut in the main competition at Cannes, where the film premiered—but it’s in many ways the closest he’s come to classic historical fiction.

Continue reading ‘Pacifiction’ Review: Albert Serra Makes A Gorgeous & Grave Tropical Anti-Epic Filled With Post-Colonial Intrigue [NYFF] at The Playlist.

“Concrete Valley” opens with a man wandering in the woods around Thorncliffe Park, one of Toronto’s first postwar high-rise neighborhoods and one of its most diverse areas. He’s Rashid (Hussam Douhna), a Syrian doctor who recently relocated to Canada with his family. And he’s lost. The film that follows is an oblique, deceptively placid study of the emasculation of exile.

Rashid lives in a tower block with his wife Farah (Amani Ibrahim) and son Ammar (Abdullah Nataf).

Continue reading ‘Concrete Valley’ Review: An Understated Study Of The Emasculation Of Exile [TIFF] at The Playlist.

Ashley McKenzie, the Nova Scotia-based director of the elliptical and scarifyingly intimate methadone-addiction drama “Werewolf,” returns with another tale of codependence and the Canadian welfare state. Talking to Film Comment in 2018, McKenzie copped to a desire “to have more extensive scenes and more elaborate choreography and staging” in future projects and hinted at her then-gestating second feature. “The elevator pitch would probably say ‘Certain Women’ meets Alan Clarke BBC portrait dramas,” she said. 

And so it is: “Queens of the Qing Dynasty,” about a neurodivergent teenager hospitalized following a(nother) suicide attempt, and the genderqueer Chinese-immigrant advocate she bonds with during her recovery, is at once rigorously intimate and richly symbolic.

Continue reading ‘Queens of the Qing Dynasty’ Review: Ashley McKenzie Crafts An Intimate And Rich Story of Friendship [TIFF] at The Playlist.

“I consider this land mine,” a Brazilian man, identified by onscreen text as a “settler,” informs the camera at one point during “The Territory.” The land in question is a section of the Amazon rainforest in the state of Rondônia, encircled by modern development, which is, in fact, the homeland and protected territory of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous people. Whether or not such legally recognized sovereignty is, in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, any match for white vibes is the subject of director Alex Pritz’s first feature, which won an Audience Award and a Jury prize at this January’s Sundance and is an issue-driven documentary gratifyingly interested in action as much as advocacy.

Continue reading ‘The Territory’ Review: Indigenous People Fight Encroaching Deforestation In An Engrossing Doc Portrait at The Playlist.

Late on in “The African Desperate,” director Martine Syms cuts away from the narrative to a montage of bucolic upstate New York imagery: rolling green fields and farmland, charming B&Bs, and village shops. On the soundtrack, we hear audio from a viral clip of a Black man telling off his former coworkers, a fuming, embattled screed: “I quit, you can’t tell me nothing. Call the police, what they gon’ do?

Continue reading ‘The African Desperate’ Review: Martine Syms’ Directorial Debut Is Full Of Insight & Vitality [NDNF] at The Playlist.

If you think you’re wasting your life, consider the case of Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who spent the years 1945 to 1974 in the jungle of Lubang, in the Philippines, waging the Second World War on behalf of Emperor Hirohito. Talk about fighting for a lost cause; and making a movie about the most famous and among the last of the Japanese “holdout soldiers” of the Pacific War may seem like a similarly foolhardy undertaking for the French filmmaker Arthur Harari.

Continue reading ‘Onoda – 10,000 Nights in the Jungle’ Review: A Moving Epic About A Quixotic Attempt At A Meaningful Life [NDNF] at The Playlist.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of arts funding, the Lithuanian national cinema has struggled to make a dent in the Western festival circuit, though that may be changing. Trickle-down from venue-hunting international productions, more generous tax incentives, and co-production agreements have the potential to cultivate a new generation of filmmakers in the same kind of fertile dramatic soil from which, for instance, the Romanian New Wave was harvested: contested historical trauma and an ambivalent transition to the Eurozone.

Continue reading ‘Pilgrims’ Review: Laurynas Bareisa’s Promising Debut Retraces The Steps Of Tragedy Through Memory & Grief [NDNF] at The Playlist.

Many of Hong Sang-soo’s films are structured around a woman’s solitary wanderings. The single ladies played by Kim Min-Hee in “On the Beach at Night Alone” or “The Woman Who Ran,” or Lee Hye-Young in “In Front of Your Face,” are free radicals, moving from encounter to encounter and disrupting the equilibrium of the people they meet, as meandering conversations reveal a friend’s dissatisfaction or a couple’s disagreement.

Continue reading ‘The Novelist’s Film’ Review: Hong Sang-Soo’s Latests Is Yet Another Charming, Focused Autofiction [Berlin] at The Playlist.

Coltan, short for columbo-tantalite, is an ore containing the metal element tantalum, which due to its resistance to corrosion and high permittivity is used in capacitors essential to the functioning of smartphones, laptops, and other high-tech devices. It is found chiefly in Africa, most abundantly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, where foreign corporations, and the cronies they install in corrupt local governments, rely on local (often child) labor subsisting on poverty wages and working in incredibly unsafe sites, to carry out a program of unsustainable ecological destruction.

Continue reading ‘Neptune Frost’: Saul Williams’ Sci-Fi Musical Is An Afrofuturist Sight To Behold [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

South Korean film director Hong Sang-soo is cinema’s reigning poet of strained politeness, awkward confrontation, and space-filling chatter. In film after film—there are two Hongs at this year’s New York Film Festival, which is about average for the prolific South Korean—characters meet in the street or on a beach, in restaurants or hotels, and talk about the weather or the food in front of them, in banal and repetitious dialogue.

Continue reading ‘Introduction’ Is Hong Sang-Soo Stripping Down His Artistry To its Simplest, Most Telling Gestures [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Let’s get this out of the way out front: Yes, the Romanian film “Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn,” winner of the Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlinale, opens with about three and a half minutes of hardcore pornography. Teacher Emilia (Katia Pascariu) and her husband Eugen go at it on digital video, complete with a little light flagellation, porn-informed dirty talk, and unsimulated oral and penetrative intercourse.

Continue reading ‘Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn’ The Golden Bear Winner Delivers The Goods [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

“Hester Street,” Joan Micklin Silver’s classic 1975 feature debut, portrays with momentous poignancy the Jewish immigrant experience in turn-of-the-century New York City: the lure of assimilation and the falling-away of tradition; the awesome, awful promise of becoming American. Newly restored in a 4K version that retains the 35mm original’s Jacob Riis-like black-and-white textures of Lower East Side tenement life, it’s a vision of the city on the brink of modernity, willed into existence at the height of the New Hollywood by a woman unaffiliated with any movement.

Continue reading ‘Hester Street’ Is A Classic Jewish Immigrant Tale Worth Seeking Out [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Unfolding like an arthouse version of that joke about what you get when you play a country song backward (you wife, your truck, and your dog come back), Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s “The Tsugua Diaries” chronicles a fictional 2020 film shoot abandoned due to a COVID protocol breach, in a backward-running narrative. An opening title card reads “Day 22,” and, eventually, a sequence at a time, “The Tsugua Diaries” rewinds to Day 1, the film-within-the-film gets its sound guy back, gets its permits back, and its shared sense of artistic purpose returns…

READ MORE: New York Film Festival 2021: The 17 Most Anticipated Films

With its inward-turned focus and quasi-incestuous relationships, every film shoot is a “bubble” to use the era-appropriate term.

Continue reading ‘The Tsugua Diaries’: Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro Deconstruct Filmmaking In A Meta-Arthouse ‘Tenet’ [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

Conspiracy theorists have spent more time researching their subjects than you have and have facts ready at their disposable with which to bury you in. Take filmmaker Oliver Stone, for example. Spend three hours with his 1991 epic “JFK,” or two more with his new nonfiction recap of the same material, and you’re bound to come away thinking he Makes Some Points. However, without the captivating veneer of fiction, Stone’s “JFK Revisted: Through The Looking Glass” comes off as a much more rhetorically dishonest work.

Continue reading ‘JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass’: Oliver Stone Attempts A Weak Victory Lap In The Receptive-To-Conspiracy Age [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.