Debut films are often tricky melanges of shopworn cliches and the unique ideas that made the artist want to make the movie in the first place. It's almost as though, in trying to figure out how to give s...
2019-09-15 20:59:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Although Rivers is getting most of his festival exposure this year with Krabi, 2562, the feature he co-directed with Thai helmer Anocha Suwichakornpong, he also made a medium-length solo work th...
2019-09-14 02:01:37 +0000 UTC View Post
In his characteristic essay-film way, Berliner uses a framing device -- his personal relationship to the New York Times -- to consider a range of broader issues. But much of the film really is about the ...
2019-09-13 21:53:26 +0000 UTC View Post
For all my dedication to Canadian cinema, this is the first time I have watched a documentary by Obomsawin, the revered filmmaker who is at this point the world's leading chronicler of the experience of ...
2019-09-13 01:21:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Among the various directors of the Filipino New Wave, John Torres (Todo todo teros, Lukas the Strange) has always been one of the strangest and most original. This newest work is long o...
2019-09-07 00:45:41 +0000 UTC View Post
The films of 60s experimentalist Edward Owens, which were rediscovered and restored not too long ago, provide a voice that had been missing from American avant-garde history for far too long. An African-...
2019-09-07 00:18:08 +0000 UTC View Post
A brief film composed of gentle, quotidian gestures, Book of Hours is elegant in its subtlety. In the film, McDonell focuses on the domestic sphere, one of a number of possible "spaces" of activ...
2019-09-06 23:56:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Beginning with a woman thumbing through a notebook of pressed plants, detailing the ailments that can be cured with each one, Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 soon becomes wider in scope, expl...
2019-09-06 22:49:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Ryan Ferko has presented a number of films in festivals past, although those previous entries have been co-directed by Faraz and Parastoo Anoushahpour. They are both listed in the credits of Hrvoji 2019-09-06 17:47:40 +0000 UTC View Post
A film that hints at a narrative but is presented as an assemblage of fragments, Second Generation suggests a love affair, a pending marriage, a history of migration and resettlement, and a sens...
2019-09-06 05:07:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I had the good fortune to first come across Erica Sheu's Transcript back in March when I was previewing films for the SF Crossroads Festival, where it stood out from the pack quite powerfully. B...
2019-09-05 23:25:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Another form of tropical malady has taken hold in Sao Paolo, and it's up to a group of renegade entomologist-epidemiologists to stop the plague, not by finding a cure to the disease itself, but by releas...
2019-09-05 07:58:21 +0000 UTC View Post
SaF05, the latest video work by Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger, could perhaps be considered a video essay, although to call it that would imply a level of directness and clarity SaF05...
2019-09-05 03:36:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Roy Samaha's Sun Rave is a complex, knotty little film that, like the espionage agents described in it, does not give up its secrets easily. By bringing a number of unlikely ideas into orbit aro...
2019-09-04 18:57:25 +0000 UTC View Post
A bit of domestic abstraction, Slow Volumes employs a 35mm camera at the center axis of both a living room and a particular point in a field outdoors, and spins out a highly relatable horizontal...
2019-09-04 18:29:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Taking as its ostensible topic the recent partial solar eclipse, Fazendiero’s film is a meditation on the role that light plays in shaping reality and our consciousness of it. To this end, we hear a re...
2019-09-02 05:38:32 +0000 UTC View Post
For the Viennale catalog, I wrote the following:
Not all reproductions are mechanical, even in our age of digital imagery, 3D printing, and instantaneous communication. It is still necessary to cre...
2019-09-01 23:46:30 +0000 UTC View Post
It is easy (if nonetheless necessary) to criticize power in its most heinous manifestations. If we consider, for example, the Trump administration's disgusting anti-immigration policies and weaponization...
2019-08-30 04:44:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Commissioned last year by a Swiss gallery but world premiering only now, Kienitz Wilkins' latest featurette nevertheless arrives piping hot. In fact, it should probably come with a warning. In a field th...
2019-08-30 00:06:22 +0000 UTC View Post
In Latin, circumplector means that which is all-encompassing. True to form, Argentinian experimentalist Solnicki (Kékszakállú) enfolds nearly everything in less than three minutes: s...
2019-08-29 23:39:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Live from Aix-en-Provence comes an unusual new film from Luke Fowler. Although his work tends to be discursive in its exploration of cultural history, here he lets the images do the talking, using his ca...
2019-08-29 23:34:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Billy is a talkie.
Epcar is one of the most interesting among the current crop of younger filmmakers, in part because his stock in trade seems to be a collection of ineffable moods. He's a...
2019-08-26 05:09:26 +0000 UTC View Post
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the intersection of experimental cinema and horror. A lot of this was occasioned by work coming out of Austria, birthplace of Freud and the uncann...
2019-08-25 22:22:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Simon Liu, who grew up between Hong Kong and the U.K. and is now based in New York City, has a distinctly urban sensibility in his films, even when the spaces he's depicting are not cities per se. They o...
2019-08-25 05:22:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Q: What's a 'structural film'?
A: That's easy! Everybody knows what a structural film is! It's when engineers design an airplane or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it w...
2019-08-24 05:57:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Joshua Gen Solondz consistently makes some of the most unusual films around. Part of this has to do with a polymorphic sensibility that I have not quite put my finger on yet -- sometimes abstract and geo...
2019-08-24 04:06:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Some films are small, intimate gestures that simply take stock of the world around us, using sound and image to describe natural cycles that tend to elude our perception because they engulf us. Low T...
2019-08-24 00:42:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Manuel DeLanda is a truly odd case. In the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, he was kind of an enfant terrible even within the world of experimental film, making grotty punk films about defacin...
2019-08-21 05:20:25 +0000 UTC View Post
The relative clarity of the image above is a bit deceptive. If you actually watch Burak Çevik's new medium-length video piece, one of the main things you'll observe is a visual quality that is significa...
2019-08-21 04:36:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry for the week-long absence. It was (is) the beginning of classes, Matt is starting a new school, and it's just been kind of a madhouse around here. But due dates are fast approaching for the avant-g...
2019-08-21 04:12:44 +0000 UTC View Post