What to make of TITANE. a sprawling study of female rage meeting toxic masculinity? Certainly filmmaker Julia Ducournau presents it in all visceral glory, eschewing the depiction of few bodily functions as she explores gender identity and the overwhelming need for affection in a world where making the wrong choice about either can be fatal.… Read More »
MANDIBLES (Mandibules)
In MANDIBLES, Quentin Dupieux takes us on a road trip with two lovable innocents and an outsized housefly. Why there is an outsized housefly in the trunk of a dilapidated Mercedes just waiting to be discovered/rescued/exploited by this pair of misfits is never explained, nor does it need to be. This latest excursion by Dupieux… Read More »
UNDINE
At no point in Christian Petzold’s UNDINE do we encounter anything as pedestrian as a character discussing the nature of the supernatural creature at the heart of this exquisitely enigmatic, emotionally intense film. Rather, we are left to ponder just what the nature of our title character is on a more human level. Whether or… Read More »
ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Om det oändliga)
In one of the series of vignettes that make up Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, we find a city café where the patrons sit in carefully constructed isolation among one another, in the foreground, a dentist who we know from the previous vignette, is in a bad mood and plagued with problems. Snow falls. Christmas carols… Read More »
KEEP AN EYE OUT (Au Poste)
The French title of Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, KEEP AN EYE OUT, relies on a clever bit of wordplay in its two words, AU POSTE. One of the meanings of poste is police station, where the action takes place. Another is post, as in taking up one’s post. There are more, the translation of which… Read More »
BACK TO BURGUNDY
BACK TO BURGUNDY’s original French title is less about returning home and more about the ties that bind one to that home. I leave the reasons for why movie titles are willfully mistranslated, but bring it up because THE TIES THAT BIND feels like a more accurate description of why a prodigal son finds it… Read More »
CYRANO, MY LOVE
CYRANO MY LOVE is an ebullient comedy of errors that recounts the fraught confluence of art, commerce, and egos that gave birth to Cyrano de Bergerac, the most successful play in French theater history. As witty and wise as that character himself, it is a love letter to the creative process that spares none of… Read More »
TRANSIT
Christian Petzold has done something extraordinary with TRANSIT. Using the novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, he has taken the story of a young German fleeing the Nazis during World War II and transmuted it into a universal story of refugees. By removing the specifics and setting it in the first-world present, the… Read More »
RADIOACTIVE
RADIOACTIVE tells a story of scientific curiosity in a world where personality skews the perception of the work itself, and politics are never far from the equation. It lays bare not just the injustice of that, but also its stupidity
THE TRUTH (La Vérité)
In Hirokazu Koreeda’s last film, the Oscar®-nominated SHOPLIFTERS, he incisively examined the ethics of capitalism, and its effects on one poverty-stricken, yet devoted, ragtag family ingeniously doing battle with a system designed to keep them down economically. In THE TRUTH, he moves the action from Tokyo to Paris to examine the ethics of veracity on… Read More »
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