Blog Posts

FUNNY GAMES (dir. Michael Haneke, 1997, Austria).

2/11/2020

ANNA: Why don’t you just kill us?
PAUL: Don’t forget the entertainment value. You’d deprive us all of our pleasure.

Haneke exposes our hunger for tidy entertainments where we watch violence from a safe distance. Extending that impulse to its logical, horrible conclusion, he rubs our face in the real human cost, and asks us to take ownership of what we really want to see.

LAW OF THE BORDER (dir. Lütfi Ö. Akad, 1966, Turkey).

2/4/2020

As a band of villagers runs sheep across the mine-ridden Turkish-Syrian border, one smuggler is torn between what he owes his community, his son, and himself as a man. Akad champions education as a means to a better future while mourning the loss of a simpler past, as a modernizing, greedy system makes good men into outlaws.

OSSOS (dir. Pedro Costa, 1997, Portugal).

1/28/2020

Costa paces his portrait of a dilapidated Lisbon slum to match the despondent characters drifting through it. A girl who treats suicide attempts and her infant with equal apathy; the father who contemplates selling it. Overcoming their inertia with the smallest kindness registers as a great feat of willpower.

AUTUMN SONATA (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1978, Sweden).

1/21/2020

“The mother’s injuries are to be handed down to the daughter.”

In 90 minutes, the legendary Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann make us feel we’ve known this mother and daughter for their entire lives. When they watch each other play piano, you see a lifetime of unspoken strife in their eyes. When they finally let loose, they fight from the very bottom of their souls.

LIMITE (dir. Mário Peixoto, 1931, Brazil).

1/14/2020

The maneuvers in 22-year-old Mário Peixoto’s first and only film still feel revolutionary today. He captures our hallucinating castaways by sticking the camera in the dirt, swinging it around wildly on a rickety rooftop, and shooting such extreme close-ups that a spool of thread becomes threatening.

WHITE MATERIAL (dir. Claire Denis, 2009, France).

1/7/2020

I think Claire Denis made the best movie last year, and this one cements her as one of my favorite directors. Isabelle Hupert gives a brutally honest performance in this clear-eyed indictment of the ongoing repercussions of blood money and colonialism.

DRAGON INN (dir. King Hu, 1967, Taiwan).

12/31/2019

An unlikely band of loyalists unite to protect the family of a deposed general from an evil order of martial-artist eunuchs. Hu infuses the combat with such wit and detail that the taunts and egos become as thrilling as the choreography.

PANDORA’S BOX (dir. G. W. Pabst, 1929, Germany).

12/24/2019

Spend the holiday with a courtesan and Jack the Ripper in Frank Wedekind’s story of a vaudevillian irresistible to men and women alike, whose actions come to a head on Christmas Eve. Louise Brooks’s Lulu is so vibrant and infectious that we root for her even as those around her crumble.

TOUKI BOUKI (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973, Senegal).

12/17/2019

Astride a motorcycle with a bull-horned skull for handlebars, a young couple tools around Dakar, looking for their meal ticket to Paris. Mambéty pays tribute to the too-cool rebels of BREATHLESS, but creates his own wild, completely unique style of visual narrative.

THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2017, Finland).

12/10/2019

A Syrian refugee seeking asylum in Helsinki falls in with a restaurateur and his bumbling staff. Despite its deadpan comedy and the occasional moment of generosity, the film ultimately refuses to minimize the repercussions of war amid a cruel and indifferent system.

BEFORE THE RAIN (dir. Milcho Manchevski, 1994, Macedonia).

12/3/2019

“The circle is not round.”

A monk exiled for sheltering a fugitive; an editor in a crumbling marriage; a grizzled photojournalist returning to a lost love. Three love stories seep into each other in this reflection on great beauty in the face of cyclical violence.

INSIANG (dir. Lino Brocka, 1976, Philippines).

11/26/2019

Insiang tries to wrest back control of her life from her spiteful mother, her mother’s predatory boyfriend, and her own deadbeat suitors. Brocka grounds the melodrama with a stark portrayal of everyday life in Manilla’s slums, making Insiang’s desperation and resolve tangible.

LA CIÉNAGA (dir. Lucretia Martel, 2001, Argentina)

11/19/2019

On the surface, Lucrecia Martel’s unsettling portrait of a family watching their summer estate rot relies on no discernible plot machinations. But as her characters subtly torture each other, the mysterious undertow of her invisible storytelling mesmerized me.

PATHER PANCHALI (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1955, India).

11/12/2019

An all-time classic I finally caught. Apu’s beleaguered mother struggles to care for his aspiring-playwright dad, rebellious sister, and ancient, impish aunt. We take in the village through the boy’s eyes, and Ray’s keenly observed, beautifully shot, tiny moments of revelation.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2007, Romania).

11/5/2019

A college student races across late-Communist Romania trying to help her roommate get an abortion. The severe laws prohibiting the procedure force the two friends to harrowing extremes, and make them question their relationships and values.

HÄXAN (dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922, Denmark)

10/29/2019

What begins as a dissertation on historical depictions of witches becomes dramatized in gory medieval detail. Christensen’s imagery is the origin of so many of our nightmares, but he also connects generations of women whom the state deemed monstrous and punished accordingly.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (dir. Jaromil Jireš, 1970, Czechoslovakia).

10/22/2019

Shape-shifting vampires and magic earrings reveal the lurking horror in fairy tales and beauty in horror stories. A teenager navigates who to trust when her suitors, church, and family might betray her, in this alternately hedonistic and immaculate Czech oddity.

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (dir. Victor Erice, 1973, Spain).

10/15/2019

An iconic monster haunts a quiet village traumatized by the Spanish Civil War. After a screening of “Frankenstein,” a little girl becomes obsessed with the macabre, seeking an encounter with a real-life outcast. A reminder that great horror inspires not just fear but empathy.

MY BRILLIANT CAREER (dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1979, Australia).

10/8/2019

A heroine to rival Jo March, Sybylla’s need for a full, artistic life clashes with family obligations, societal constraints, and a very dreamy Sam Neill on horseback. The actors fill Gillian Armstrong’s exquisitely composed shots with giddy lust and mischief.

THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM (dir. Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, 1975, West Germany).

10/1/2019

A housekeeper faces police detainment and libelous tabloids after sleeping with an accused terrorist. Directing with husband Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta unflinchingly depicts a woman confronting a savagely sanctimonious culture with defiance.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1962, Mexico).

9/24/2019

A party of aristocrats lounging after their fancy dinner gradually discover they can’t leave the living room. Hours become days. A bear, a disembodied hand, and their own impotence torment them as their selfishness and neglect bring society crashing down.

WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (dir. Dušan Makavejev, 1971, Yugoslavia).

9/17/2019

“Between socialism and physical love there can be no conflict!”

A documentary on a controversial psychoanalyst spirals into anarchic, obscene satire. Makavejev was exiled for derision of the state, but he also targets the everyday ideologues who put dogma ahead of people.

MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000, Thailand).

9/10/2019

A series of strangers tell a story one piece at a time. Each turns the narrative in their own direction, carrying the film crew from location to location adding new perspectives and tones. Remarkable, dizzying tour of a culture and the act of storytelling.

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (dir. Federico Fellini, 1957, Italy).

9/3/2019

Giulietta Masina’s endlessly expressive face drives the whole film. She may be robbed and shoved in the river in the opening seconds, but Masina refuses to let Cabiria become pathetic. We have no reason to think she’ll be ok, but her eyes make us believe it.

MON ONCLE ANTOINE (dir. Claude Jutra, 1971, Canada).

8/27/2019

A haunting, radically truthful Québécois Christmas movie for the dog days of summer. A boy working in his uncle’s general store trespasses into the realms of sex and death but both have a higher cost than he envisioned.

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