Film festivals, like the rest of us, are still adapting to the unique challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, with major ones drastically scaling back their lineups or devising a hybrid physical-virtual screening schedules. The 58th New York Film Festival will kick off on September 17 with simultaneous screenings of Steve McQueens Lovers Rock at two drive-in theaters in Brooklyn and Queens (the festival will also be using another drive-in in the Bronx for further screenings). Lovers Rock is the first episode of McQueens five-part Small Axe miniseries, set among Londons West Indian community; the film, along with two others in the anthology (Mangrove and Red, White And Blue) will also be available to ticket-holders for designated four-hour windows online. After the cancellation of this years Cannes Film Festival, its been encouraging to see so many festivals coping with the impacts of the pandemic, even if it seems somewhat antithetical for a film festival like this one to be effectively dispersed across the globe rather than concentrated in a single communal event.
The festivals socially minded main slate features a wealth of new works from master documentarians like Fredrick Wiseman (City Hall), Jia Zhang-ke (Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue), and Gianfranco Rossi (Notturno). And particularly notable among the works of nonfiction in this years slate is Garrett Bradleys Time, a stirring look at 21 years in the life of a family thats been irrevocably altered by the prison-industrial complex. On the fiction side, the lineup is no less auteur-friendly, with the festival presenting the latest works by Christian Petzold (Undine), Tsai Ming-Liang (Days), Hong Sang-soo (The Woman Who Ran), Cristi Puiu (Malmkrog), and more. And this years much-anticipated centerpiece selection is Chlo Zhaos follow-up to The Rider, Nomadland, about a woman (played by Frances MacDormand) who lost everything in the Great Recession and travels the country in a camper in the wake of her husbands death.
This mix of socio-politically engaged documentaries and auteurist cinema also marks the festivals Spotlight section. There, youll find new films by Pedro Almodvar (the short drama The Human Voice starring Tilda Swinton), Sofia Coppola (On the Rocks), and the prolific-in-death Orson Welles (Hopper/Welles), as well as David Dufresnes The Monopoly of Violence, about police violence in France, and Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbuss All In: The Fight for Democracy, which is concerned with the history and current activism against voter suppression and is based around interviews with American politician Stacey Abrams.
Elsewhere, 59 films with a more experimental bent, interweaving fiction and nonfiction, will screen as part of the Currents program. Of particular note is the latest from Nicols Pereda (Fauna) and another dispatch from beyond the grave by Ral Ruiz (The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, co-directed by his widow and collaborator, Valeria Sarmiento). And among the notable titles slotted in the Revivals section, which connects cinemas rich past to its dynamic present through an eclectic assortment of new restorations, are Bla Tarrs Damnation, Hou Hsiao-hsiens Flowers of Shanghai, and Jean Vigos Zero for Conduct.
Right now, even the films most engaged with reality can feel out of date if they happen to have been shot more than eight months ago; seeing everyday people on screen shaking hands or standing in lines can have an uncanny effect. But then, watching art flicks at a drive-in might serve as a constant reminder to festivalgoers how much stranger the world has gotten than last years already-unnerving status quo. Theres something equal parts twisted and romantic about the left-for-dead format of the drive-in theater uniting with theater-killing streaming technology to preserve the institution of the film festival. Its like temporal streams have been crossed, the mid-20th-century society of the auto hybridized with the 21st-century society of the mobile phone. The erstwhile downsides of these formatsthe isolation of the home theater or hermetically sealed family carturn out to be their primary advantages in our current context. Pat Brown
For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, visit Film at Lincoln Center. Capsule reviews of films in the main slate appear below; check back as more titles are added, with links to full reviews.
Dea Kulumbegashvilis Beginning centers around a Jehovahs Witness missionary, Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), who lives with her husband, David (Rati Oneli), and young son in a remote village in the mountains outside of Tbilisi. The close-knit community they tend to faces extreme prejudice and persecution from the local Orthodox Christian majority, as illustrated in the films startling opening. Foreshadowing another shocking event late in the film, one that shows the imperceptible force of religious scripture weighing on the characters, this openings blurring of boundaries between spiritual imagination and reality reveals itself to be a key theme of the narrative. Though a strictly minimalist approach means that her visual motifs emerge organically from the action, Kulumbegashvili makes a few unexpected, rather Hanekian compositional choices that break with the films sense of naturalism to more explicitly wring allegorical significance from certain sequences. Demonstrating the extent of Yanas resilience in facing the most extreme and personal tests of faith, and her willingness to sacrifice everything for her community, Kulumbegashvili vividly imagines powerlessness and despair being transformed into a supernatural, redemptive force. David Robb
The meticulousness and control of Song Fangs feature-length directorial debut, Memories Look at Me, gave the film a specific conceptual focus. The Chinese actress and filmmakers follow-up feature, The Calming, places a similar emphasis on technique, but its scrupulously shot and staged compositions tend to suck the life out of every frame. The narrative is simple, and again loosely autobiographical: Song surrogate Lin Tong (Qi Xi), a documentary filmmaker who we learn early on has recently been through a breakup, drifts between Japan, China, and Hong Konglocations with stated sentimental value to Song, who drew on her memories of visiting them during the film festival run of Memories Look at Me. That sense of personal meaning is meant to be conveyed through a films worth of immaculate long takes of Lin inhabiting different spaces, from bustling cityscapes to minimally furnished apartments, to lush, sprawling natural environments. But as a result of Songs seeming unwillingness to give us much understanding of this character and her limited formalist vocabulary, The Calming is left unable to connect angst to anything significantly deeper. Sam C. Mac
Frederick Wiseman never steps in the same river twice, though the methods of this prolific, preeminent documentarian are, with rare exception, unchanging. So it is with City Hall, Wisemans formidable and incisive exploration of local government in Boston, Massachusetts. Non-diegetic score and identifying on-screen titles are eschewed throughout, while the films duration is well past the feature-length normin this case, four-and-a-half engrossing hours. The camerawork, courtesy of Wisemans longtime collaborator John Davey, is mostly fly-on-the-wall, swish-panning between or settling for extended periods on a given scenes subjects. Mundanities that many other artists would turn away from are manna to Wiseman. He gets as much poetic and provocative mileage out of a budget meeting that projects the fiscal year to come as he does a glass skyscraper reflecting a magic-hour sunset. The films provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Wisemans own, and which leave room for individual interpretation. What each of us sees is what each of us gets. But how do we arrive at our respective ideological terminus? City Hall isnt an incitement, so much as an invitation to serenely reflect on and think through systems of power that are, like the people who labor within them, constantly evolvingfor better and for worse. Keith Uhlich
Centered on the quotidian lives of two unnamed men (played by Lee Kang-sheng and Anong Houngheuangsy), Days finds Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang reflecting once again on peoples unspeakable loneliness and alienation in a world lacking in reciprocity. In a series of tableaux vivants, where the camera remains mostly still and sound is entirely diegetic, the uneventful days of the two men unfold, or, considering the films meticulous attention to such elements as water and fire, you could say that they burn slowly. Indeed, the younger man (Houngheuangsy) stokes the embers of a fire so he can methodically make his lunch, washing vegetables and fish in buckets inside his bathroom and concocting a makeshift stove by placing a pot on top of the other one containing the embers. The older man (Lee), in turn, is seen taking a bath, stretching his sore body in the woods, and staring out a window for what feels like an entire afternoon, as he listens to the sound of water. Were Lee facing the lens, the sequence would belong to the same documentary universe of Wang Xiaoshuai or Sergei Loznitsaof evidence through dogged visual persistence. Diego Semerene
Like the destitute musician at the center of Ritwik Ghataks The Cloud-Capped Star, Sharad (Aditya Modak) sees singing as more than just a profession; for him, its a heightened state of being. And even as we see him become weathered and pudgy as time, along with a lack of success and, naturally, money, wears him down, he remains determined to teach raag at a local school, while still performing and trying to sell CDs of rare raag musicians on the side. Given the philosophical nature of the guru Maais interview snippets and the remarkably beautiful musical performances of Sharad and his guru, Sindhubai (Dr. Arun Dravid), writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane appears, for much of The Disciple, to be fully celebrating the asceticism and endless struggle that Sharad has committed himself to. But as time goes on, we not only see the costs of pursuing perfection, but also the isolation that results from his strict and limiting adherence to practicing and teaching only raag. Its a single-minded focus that is, in large part, passed down from his own gurus, though when he berates one of his students for wanting to sing raag in a fusion band, it reveals not a love for the artform to which hes devoted his life, but a domineering spirit that arises from his musical monomania. Derek Smith
On paper, Victor Kossakovskys Gunda, a wordless documentary about the everyday life of a few farm animals may suggest a quiet idyll in the vein of the goatherding sequences from Michelangelo Frammartinos Le Quattro Volte. But with its stark, forbidding black-and-white cinematography and dense, unsettling sound design, the film resembles nothing so much as Eraserhead. The newborn piglets in the film, whose faces look surprisingly alien-like in extreme close-up and whose aching squeals can be rather unnerving, even at times resemble the baby from David Lynchs cult classic. By eschewing the Disneyfied anthropomorphism of Luc Jacquets March of the Penguins and the tidy narrativizing of the Planet Earth series, Kossakovsky refuses to resort to the old clich that animals are just like us. Theyre not, really. And in Gunda, common farm animals have rarely seemed so un-human. Which isnt to say that we dont form a relationship with these creatures. Relying heavily on shallow-focus shots often positioned near ground leveland thus close to its subjects eyelinethe film gives us something of the experience of being a farm animal: of grazing in a field, caring for a newborn, and aimlessly roaming around a farm. And by the time the credits roll on the film, we realize weve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths. Keith Watson
Across I Carry You with Me, director and co-screenwriter Heidi Ewing devotes herself to championing a cause above all else. Which is to say, she doesnt attest to a belief in cinema as art of nuance and ambiguity. Hers is a kind of pedagogical, if not exactly activist, filmmaking style thats not without its commendable intentions or political urgency, but it ends up feeling like a one-dimensional PSA. Ewings tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn, robbing the spectator of the experience of doubtof wandering and of wonder. Perhaps inevitably, this approach reduces Ivn (Armando Espitia) and Gerardos (Christian Vazquez) life in Mexico to the tropes to queer victimhood: the sissy boy whose father catches him wearing make-up and teaches him a lesson so he can become a real man, the gay couple whos attacked by rowdy straight men on an empty street. Ivn and Gerardo are flattened into spokespeople for a preconceived idea thats imposed on us instead of richly developedthat is, whether the most suffocating closet is the one where you live in the shadows as an illegal immigrant or as queer person afraid of being outed. By the time Ewing changes aesthetic course in the end, the rawness of the filmic style feels contrived and unearned, unable to retroactively grant lifeblood into archetypes. Semerene
Matas Pieiros Isabella, a cubist riddle composed of elliptical scenes that hint at conflict, finds the Argentine writer-director sliding further into abstraction than ever before. The film cloaks its muted, wispy narrative in symbolic digressions and repetitive formal gestures that imply some grand design just beyond comprehensiona fitting analogy given the recurring presence of an overhead shot of hands arranging a puzzle consisting only of differently shaded notecards. Pieiro remains a superlative director of actors and a careful modulator of rhythm, and part of the films longueurs have to do with an effort to provide respite from just how fast everyone talks and walks. But the drama of external turbulence and internal reckoning being sketched in the film, particularly as it relates to emerging motherhood, feels emotionally distinct from the amorous entanglements that Pieiro was reveling in just half a decade ago, and if hes indeed entering a phase of middle-aged concerns, its easy to feel primed for something deeply moving to come next. If thats the case, then Isabella feels like a stylistic and thematic trial run. Carson Lund
One of three episodes from his upcoming miniseries, Small Axe, that will world premiere at the New York Film Festival, Steve McQueens Lovers Rock is nothing if not a mood piece. For McQueen, whos of Grenadian and Trinidadian descent, the series is his most personal project to date, weaving together various stories within Londons West Indian community in the 1980s. Set largely over one night at a house party and gently tracing the growing attraction between Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and the mysterious Franklyn (Micheal Ward), Lovers Rock lovingly captures the sense of community thats fostered within the house right out the gate, as the musicians set up the sound system and the jolly cooks in the kitchen start banging out curry goat and ackee and saltfish. The films centerpiece, set to Janet Kays lovers rock hit Silly Games, plays out across a sea of polyester, beautiful Black bodies rapturously entwined. The social world that McQueen envisions is lived-in, tactile, and especially wondrous across scenes that fixate on the temperature of a song (from Carl Douglass Kung Fu Fighting to the Revolutionaries Kunta Kinte) turning the dial up on peoples libidos. Luckily thats the better part of Lovers Rocks 70-minute runtime, because whenever it follows Martha out of the house and puts her in the crosshairs of a potential threat or generally catches her in a moment of confusion about some incident that feels every bit as alien to us, its difficult to not see the films episodic roots. Ed Gonzalez
Cristi Puius Malmkrog is based on 19th-century Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyovs prophetic Three Conversations, which, through a series of dialectical maneuvers, addresses such topics as economic materialism, nationalism, and abstract moralism. The film takes place on a snow-covered hillside, where a large pastel-pink mansion sits and Puiu turns the philosophical into drama. Sheltered in the mansions walls are a small group of aristocrats that includes a politician, a general and his wife, and a young countess. It all has the makings of a game of Clue, but the mysteries here are linguistic. A Christmas gathering stretches on in what seems to be real time, as the partys high-minded philosophical and political chatter takes on an increasingly strained air. That tension is heightened by the obstacles that Puiu uses to discombobulate his audience. Malmkrog is the Transylvanian village where the film takes place, yet the characters, who speak primarily in French, talk of being in Russia. And as they discuss imminent war and the potential outcomes of violence, its as if the film appears to exist outside of time and place. Ben Flanagan
Though set in 1960s London, Steve McQueens Mangrove is very much pitched to the contemporary moment, specifically the global movement against racism and police brutality. The first of five episodes in McQueens Small Axe miniseries (though, oddly, the second to screen at this years festival), the film is a docudrama-style retelling of the case of the Mangrove Nine, a group of protesters who were arrested and put on trial for demonstrating against the local polices relentless harassment and intimidation of Notting Hills Black community. Unfortunately, McQueen never quite finds his footing with this rich historical material, packing the script (co-written with Alastair Siddons) with so much leaden exposition and impassioned though repetitious speechifying that theres little room left for the characters to breathe. The trajectory of Caribbean restaurant proprietor Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), an at-first reluctant member of the emerging resistance who comes to embrace his role as a movement leader, ostensibly forms the emotional core of the story, but Crichlow is too aloof and vaguely drawn for his arc to leave much impact. In contrast to the intoxicating late-night groove of Lovers Rock, which showcased the loosest, funkiest filmmaking of McQueens career, Mangrove finds the director at his most formally conservative, wrapping this story of resistance, rebellion, and racial terror in a disappointingly stuffy package. Watson
Sam Pollards MLK/FBI is an impressive reassessment of an American icon, approaching sensational material in forthright terms and without devolving into sensationalism. Based largely on Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrows 2015 book The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From Solo to Memphis, this knotty and compelling documentary threads together the story of the F.B.I.s obsession with finding compromising secrets about King with an unusually frank accounting of what some of those secrets were. When Garrow published a blockbuster story in 2019 alleging that King had witnessed or potentially even taken part in a 1964 rape at a hotel, it caused a brief flutter but was largely overlooked in the mainstream media. Pollard handles this explosive issue with restraint and intelligence. The film shows no illusions about the extent of Kings affairs. But it also refrains from any dubious moral calculations by giving his personal deceptions the same weight as his public morality. Pollard also deals carefully with Garrows most damning allegation, giving the thinly documented charge its due but carving out space around it for uncertainty. While the film doesnt try to elevate Kings pedestal any higher, it also doesnt try to knock him off of it. Chris Barsanti
Inside the La MACA prison in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a newly arrived prisoner (Bakary Kon) becomes a Roman, a storyteller tasked with spinning yarns as entertainment, with the threat of being hung on an iron hook if he fails to hold everyones attention. This unlucky Scheherazade-like character thus finds himself at the center of an explosion of activity as the other prisoners prepare for this ritualistic evening. The most striking aspect of Night of the Kings is the way in which the prisoners begin to act out Romans story, voicing characters and even engaging in interpretive song and dance as if possessed by the spirit to act. The camera regularly shifts away from Roman to move in lockstep with the prisoners contortions and twirling movements, resulting in a poetry of motion that illuminates his improvised tale better than the actual depictions of it. Despite its bleak context, the film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives. That a film so frequently harrowing can so often feel joyous without every trivializing the state of its characters imprisonment is a testament to the way that writer-director Philippe Lacte resolutely finds the meaning embedded within ritual, and how the activities of the inmates, however strange, constitute routines every bit as normalizing as the daily tasks of those living their lives outside the walls of the prison. Jake Cole
Im not homeless, Fern (Frances McDormand) says in response to the concerned query of an old friend in Chlo Zhaos Nomadland. Im just houseless. And she says it in a distinctly sharp, guarded, and prideful tone that McDormand expertly deploys throughout the film. Im fine, her voice and slightly narrowed eyes say, but dont come any closer. Her standoffishness points to the pride of a van-dwelling and only occasionally employed woman who spurns pity while trying to carve out a place for herself in a society that doesnt leave space for people not defined by steady careers or well-rooted homes. Using a minimal and improvised-feeling script that emphasizes interaction and happenstance over story, Zhao places Fern and the gorgeous landscapes she travels through at the forefront of the film. There are times when Joshua James Richardss sweeping cinematography and Ludovico Einaudis gently emotive music point to a far more romantic vision than that suggested by Ferns hard-bitten attitude. But by juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her films somewhat placid surface. In the end, whether Fern roams the desert or returns to housed life, the unfulfilled promise of America will keep pushing her back to the horizon. Barsanti
The common understanding of documentaries is that theyre intended to inform in particular ways: candid footage often complemented by explanatory text and graphics, testimony of witnesses and experts who frame and flesh out the events in question, contemplative pans across archival evidence, and, in the age of reality TV, extended interviews with the subjects themselves in close-up, providing a kind of running interior monologue. Gianfranco Rosis documentaries, though they take on topics of great socio-political import, eschew virtually all of these conventions and thus demand a different kind of engagementone rooted in empathy for the experiences of his essentially anonymous human subjects. His refusal to firmly place the segments of life that he captures within an explicit broader framework might be seen as an effort to keep his images resolutely in the present. The unpredictable power outages and food shortages in major cities, the unsettling presence of foreign armies, the mental and physical suffering of children whose families and neighbors have been slaughtered by ISISthe dreadful beauty of Notturnos experiential approach to cinema emphasizes that these arent impersonal events on a timeline, but the current life as lived by millions in the Near East. Brown
Despite so much identification, and despite the fact that some of the best films ever made, from Scenes from a Marriage to A Summers Tale, are precisely about masculine cowardliness and feminine despair, why is it that The Salt of Tears makes no room for genuine emotion to emerge? Which is peculiar given that Philippe Garrel so recently, with In the Shadow of Women and Lover for a Day, documented the impossibility of monogamy with not only a no-nonsense sensibility but also profound gravitas. Maybe the failure of the film is in Garrels use of melodramatic music during transitional scenes, a device at odds with the detached style of the rest of the film. Maybe its in the overtly fable-like structure that reduces the characters to not just archetypes, but cutouts. Maybe its in the omniscient voiceover narration that punctuates the film with such disaffection and irregularity. Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit. He thus elevates The Salt of Tears to the status of a work to be enjoyed only intellectually, as if, like Luc (Logann Antuofermo), he, too, had learned to foreclose feeling for the sake of some fantasy of self-preservation or pride. Semerene
Divided into 18 titled chapters, Jia Zhang-kes documentary Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in history. In the film, a 2019 literary festival in Jias home province of Shanxi is the springboard for three writers takes on how China has been transformed since the 1940s. Although the style and manner of the writers vary widely, they each describe a time of radical change, particularly how small villages like Jias were rocked by the tumult of the Communist Party takeover in 1949, then the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and then the turbo-charged urbanization of the new millennium. Taking a quieter and less barbed approach to addressing the state of modern China than fans of his work are likely used to from such politically pointed dramas as A Touch of Sin, Jia refers to the documentary as a symphony. As such, it features discrete movements and some repeated themes, like the beautiful interludes in which farm workers recite short snippets from the books being discussed. What it doesnt have, however, is much of a crescendo. Barsanti
In 1997, Robert Richardson was convicted along with his wife, Sibil, of robbing a credit union in Shreveport, Louisiana. At the time, the couple had four sons, and Sibil was pregnant with twin boys. Considering her situation, Sibil took a plea bargain and was sentenced to 12 years, though she was out on parole after only three-and-a-half. Meanwhile, Robert was sentenced to 65 years without parole. Time doesnt, and perhaps doesnt need to, trot out statistics to make the case that Roberts draconian sentence represents a perpetuation of anti-Black racism. Thats because director Garrett Bradley has the receipts: years of home-video diaries that Sibil recorded for Robert as she worked tirelessly to support her family while also trying to secure legal motions for his re-sentencing. The films title evokes doing time, but we dont see Robert actually serving his sentence; instead, we feel its duration in the gap its left in his familys life, and in their words were offered an oblique commentary on the history of Black incarceration. Bradleys film is about feeling time, about conveying some idea of what 21 years feels like to someone else. Far more than a polemic against the prison-industrial complex, Time reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time. Brown
Set in the 1920s on the border between Mexico and Belize, Yulene Olaizolas Tragic Jungle initially tracks the clandestine movement of Agnes (Indira Andrewin) as she runs away from an arranged marriage to a white settler. This narrative arc plays out as a vicious critique of colonialism, but the film takes a dramatic turn when an unconscious Agnes is found by a group of chicleros. Agnes, who earlier acknowledged her sexual inexperience and curiosity to her sister (Shantai Obispo), is at once apprehensive and receptive to the callous advances of the more aggressive workers. And the convoluted sexual politics that arise from her excitement and fear complicate scenes where sexual violation becomes indistinguishable from fantasy. Tragic Jungle never becomes a full-on horror film, but Olaizola engages with indigenous legends and colonial history across a story where misogyny is turned against the patriarchy in ways that recall recent genre offerings like The Witch. Compared to that films turn toward the outright macabre, though, Tragic Jungle operates in a dreamier, more ambiguous register. It suggests that Agnes is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation against men who second-guess their fears and superstitions until they realize too late they should have trusted their instincts from the start. Cole
Clearly identifying with and celebrating the expertise of their subjectsa handful of elderly men from Piedmont, Italy, who pursue precious white alba truffles in the forests of the countrys northern regionand their resistance to nosy profiteers, The Truffle Hunters seems driven by a desire to enshrine the men in a timeless tableaux. Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw establish a leisurely movement between the films different threads, presenting each in the same handsome, methodical manner so as to encourage viewers to draw their own conclusions about the ethics of the buyer-supplier dynamic. The sequences devoted to the highbrow arena of truffle auctions, where enthusiasts come to sniff and evaluate samples of the earthy substance, are no less detailed in their observation than the passages in the forests and at country homes. But what eventually becomes self-evident is the warmth, self-sufficiency, and camaraderie of the hunters compared to the businesslike aloofness of those on the receiving end of their laborinsatiable careerists who, in a handful of scenes, are shown to barely even evince much pleasure for the food itself. This reminder of the fragility of agrarian traditions in the face of a merciless profit motive is a welcome one delivered with tact and subtlety, but Dweck and Kershaw occasionally deliver it at the expense of their titular subjects. Lund
Throughout his increasingly formidable oeuvre, Christian Petzold has nested stories of doomed love in surveys of his home nations reaction to economic or historical upheavals. Though at once lighter and stranger than any of his earlier work, Undine makes the melodramatic trappings of the directors previous films its explicit subject, questioning the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting. Its ironic and puzzling, then, that Undines eponymous character (Paula Beer) is both human and a water sprite. As this typically compact but deceptively rich film moves along, flashes of dislocation proliferate, undermining its seemingly contemporary setting and leaving us to wonder whether love and logic are compatible. As Petzold ushers his lovers toward doom, the film almost seems to rewind, revisiting most of its settings and turning sites of passion into mausoleums of aching and regret. Form follows function, Undine says at one point, and with minor alterations in framing and presentation Petzold fundamentally shifts our sense of these locations. Apparently the first in a trilogy of modern stories based on fables, Undine is a striking change of pace that sacrifices none of the directors intellect or ambition. Christopher Gray
Hong Sang-soos The Woman Who Ran is defined by absences: by who isnt in the frame and by what isnt said throughout conversations that appear to be determinedly trivial. Returning to Seoul after years away, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) reconnects with a trio of female friends, and they talk of the food they eat and indulge in local gossip, repeating observations with a fervor that feels obsessive and mindless, as if these women have gotten too calcified in their own lives to utter anything but mantras. Yet Hong and his actors communicate the disappointment and sadness thats being suppressed by well-practiced politeness, offering anecdotes that abound in pointed loose ends. Throughout, you may recall that audacious sequence in Grass in which a woman repeatedly went up and down a flight of stairs, as Hong fashions a similar yet subtler portrait of stasis with his latest. Many Hong films examine romantic pressures from the POV of a surrogate for the director himself, while The Woman Who Ran suggests Hongs fantasy of how women discuss him when hes not around. Chuck Bowen
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- How to Watch Immaculate: Is the Sydney Sweeney Movie Streaming? - TheWrap - March 24th, 2024
- THE FIRST OMEN: A Battle With The Devil And An NC-17 Rating FANGORIA - FANGORIA - March 24th, 2024
- Elevated Horror: The New Wave of Artful Scares Taking Over Hollywood - LRM Online - March 24th, 2024
- Late Night With the Devil Plot Explained: The True Meaning of the Movie - The Direct - March 24th, 2024
- David Chase is directing his first film in 12 years. Its a horror movie. - NJ.com - March 24th, 2024
- Us Was The Box Office Hit That Gave Jordan Peele True Power In Hollywood - SlashFilm - March 24th, 2024
- Cast of 'Gremlins': Catch Up With the Stars of the '80s Hit - First For Women - March 24th, 2024
- 'Immaculate' Review: Sydney Sweeney Is Wide-Eyed but Sly - The New York Times - March 24th, 2024
- Sydney Sweeney explains that bloody 'Immaculate' ending - Entertainment Weekly News - March 24th, 2024
- When Will Sydney Sweeney's Horror Film, 'Immaculate,' Be Available to Stream? - AOL - March 24th, 2024
- Blumhouse to Return Insidious and Other Titles to Theaters for Halfway to Halloween Fest - Hollywood Reporter - March 16th, 2024
- Every Movie In The Wrong Turn Franchise Ranked - SlashFilm - March 16th, 2024
- Blumhouse Celebrating 'Halfway to Halloween' With Five Horror Movies Returning to 100 AMC Movie Theaters - Bloody Disgusting - March 16th, 2024
- DeWanda Wise Sings Creepy Theme Of New Horror Film: 'Imaginary' - The Root - March 16th, 2024
- Hostel: Part II (2007) WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? - JoBlo.com - March 16th, 2024
- New LEPRECHAUN Movie Will Be Funny, Scary And Full Of Practical Effects - FANGORIA - March 16th, 2024
- Blumhouse Celebrating Halfway to Halloween With Five Horror Movies Returning to 100 AMC Movie Theaters - IMDb - March 16th, 2024
- The Horror Nail-Biter On Max With A Controversial Ending - Giant Freakin Robot - March 16th, 2024
- "Says the person who was in Madame Web": Sydney Sweeney is Getting Skewered for Saying Modern Horror Movies ... - FandomWire - March 16th, 2024
- First trailer for horror movie reboot The Crow features an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgrd on a bloody mission of revenge - Gamesradar - March 16th, 2024
- You'll Never Find Me Is Unforgettable Horror, See The Terror In Action - Giant Freakin Robot - March 16th, 2024
- The First Omen star has seen all of your internet theories about the horror movie prequel and, well, they're all wrong - Gamesradar - March 16th, 2024
- Sltface take on horror movies with their new single, 'Final Grl' - Dork Magazine - March 16th, 2024
- From 'Five Nights at Freddy's' to 'Imaginary': Why Blumhouse loves PG-13 horror - theday.com - March 16th, 2024
- The First Omen's Big Death Reveal Really Doesn't Bode Well For The Prequel - Screen Rant - March 16th, 2024
- 20 Scariest Horror Movies to Come Out in the Last 5 Years - MovieWeb - March 16th, 2024
- 'The Animal Kingdom' Exclusive Clip Previews the Gnarly Body Horror of Magnet's New Movie - Bloody Disgusting - March 16th, 2024
- 'Oddity' Review: This Supernatural Horror Film Will Tear You To Pieces | SXSW 2024 - Collider - March 16th, 2024
- "Marketing is failing this movie tremendously": David Dastmalchian's Late Night With the Devil Dubbed as One of the ... - FandomWire - March 16th, 2024
- STOPMOTION is a handcrafted tale of beauty and horror - Moviejawn - March 16th, 2024
- Horror Lovers Will Love this Dining Spot in Texas - klaq.com - March 8th, 2024
- Is Late Night With The Devil Based On A True Story? - Screen Rant - March 8th, 2024
- Kooky King: 6 of the Weirdest Stephen King Film Adaptations - Nightmare on Film Street - March 8th, 2024
- The Unknown, the Viral Willy Wonka Experience Villain, Is Already Getting Their Own Horror Movie - IGN - March 8th, 2024
- 13 Original Horror Movies We Can't Wait to See in 2024 - Screen Rant - March 8th, 2024
- From 'Imaginary' to 'Five Nights at Freddy's.' Why Blumhouse loves PG-13 horror - Los Angeles Times - March 8th, 2024
- Imaginary Movie Review: M3gan Meets The Boogeyman - Mama's Geeky - March 8th, 2024
- Christopher Nolan Originally Conceived Inception As A Horror Movie - SlashFilm - March 8th, 2024
- 'Whalefall' Movie in the Works From 'No One Will Save You' Director Brian Duffield - The Mary Sue - March 8th, 2024
- Horror Movie Based On THE UNKNOWN From Glasgow's WILLY WONKA Experience In The Works Horror Movie ... - CBM (Comic Book Movie) - March 8th, 2024
- Horrifying 'Late Night With The Devil' Trailer Released - Outkick - March 8th, 2024
- Imaginary review: M3GAN, take the wheel - Dexerto - March 8th, 2024
- The Unknown: Horror Movie Based on Unofficial Willy Wonka Experience Is in the Works - ComingSoon.net - March 8th, 2024
- Imaginary Film Review: Light on Frights - Loud And Clear Reviews - March 8th, 2024
- Dead Mail Directors on Their '80s Horror Influences - MovieWeb - March 8th, 2024
- HORROR BEAT: Blumhouse offers a non-update on the future of THE EXORCIST - Comics Beat - March 8th, 2024
- And the Oscar for best picture doesn't go to ... horror! - NPR - March 8th, 2024
- Shaitaan OTT Release: When And Where To Watch R Madhavan And Ajay Devgn Starrer Horror Thriller Film - Indiatimes.com - March 8th, 2024
- The 'Wonka Experience' Is Being Turned Into A Horror Movie - UPROXX - March 8th, 2024
- 8 new horror movies on Netflix, Max, Shudder and more in March 2024 - TechRadar - March 8th, 2024
Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero