With harshly deadpan imagery, Seth A. Smith's Tin Can is a distantly fed close-up of tiny starvations. Anna Hopkins gives her character both strength and weakness and is able to differentiate what moments are realization and what are revelation. If all stories are doomed, revenge seems to meet a different maker than love. Class, age, access, protection...I don't know. Kick against that loneliness, tip it over, and still humans are what separate us from being human.
No heart of gold, here. Just difficult people feeling small. In this, The Whale, Fraser plays Charlie as goofy and scared and watches as they become the same thing. His performance finds not only common ground but also an earth to step quietly upon. Hong Chau, as Liz, gives an outing both open and inner, and for all the air sucked out of nonexistent rooms, her performance makes place hard to leave. Morton and Sink hit different keys and I was glad that both seemed beyond grace notes. I saw no lingering, nor excessive helplessness, nor loving of what helplessness there was. I did see these characters eyeing the exit immediately and then some deciding to stay, and others deciding to stay until their staying was exposed as a decoy for lost absence. I saw people pausing in doorways, brightly going, brightly gone. Not everything in the film is a perfect fit, and the ending both works and doesn't work, and is probably not what really happened. But it wears well the wearing down.
Theodore Schaefer's Giving Birth to a Butterfly is a disciplined dream that voids abstraction with a logic that is so awake it doesn't need sleep to get to the places it passes by to protect its map. I loved it. Annie Parisse and Gus Birney bell departure with a look and ring arrival in the church of the heartbreakingly deadpan. Owen Campbell and Paul Sparks each become elemental to a different outskirt, and give just enough blur to the ineffectively invisible, while Rachel Resheff grants a past permanence to the momentary. Things, here, are what they seem. Bring your leavings.
Morrisa Maltz's The Unknown Country is a work of deep location and knowing randomness that has a sweet tooth for the spare feast that is companionship and for the busy desolation that candies the eye. Aimlessness has many churches, and Lily Gladstone finds worship enough in her performance to cut the past with both clenched jaw and soft blink while drawing futures from a withholding present. What an elegant surplus of discovery is found, here, where nothing moves beneath the feet of those called to the body that carries their stillness.
David Fincher's The Killer is empty male whiteness as deep black comedy. Or it's just efficiently smug and hollow and kills everyone but the rich white dude. I am going with the former. But the joke might be on me.
I absolutely love Babak Jalali's Fremont. For how it memorializes memory, for how it details and decorates the abandoned time machine of place, for how its characters believe they are pressed for words when they are actually pressed for how to language them, for its inward humor and outward heroics, for the path it cuts for heartbreak, for the space it leaves the unfixed, and and and. And nothing I’ve said really says anything that speaks to what this film creates a voice for. As Donya, Anaita Wali Zada’s performance is both wall and fly, a movement based on a waiting impatience, a look looking for a look back. Visibility is no healer. Witness, no miracle. And yet, you’ll see, if you haven’t already, something new, here. Something wonderfully made. Familiar, far away, whole.
Megalomaniac is mean, mad, and sad as fuck. A brilliance in its desperation. A sobbing in its violent glories. Pay attention to what it shows. Almost anti-exploitive. Eline Schumacher is a revelation whose performance ditches the revelatory to be instead a human from trauma's first future. It's demonic through and through, and raises the living.
Via hyper engaged writing that re-imagines tired time travel and horror fantasies into a very awake grindhouse style teen movie that's progressive in both its reverse reverence and anti-homage, Jennifer Reeder's idea-driven and visually off-road Perpetrator invades and enhances spaces usually reserved for male histories and occupies the timeline thereof by overthrowing the mundanely comfortable with the bizarrely familiar. Kiah McKirnan makes her impossible performance relatable long enough to give it teeth, and short enough to quicken the blood might the heart reclaim its beating. There's so much here that even its revelations play catch-up to the known and the knowing.
The Adults is a ferociously sad film, not a showstopper in sight, just all show all the time. As siblings, Sophia Lillis deepens everything she does and doesn't touch, Hannah Gross is hermetically raw, and Michael Cera channels Julia era Tilda Swinton and Taxi Driver era Robert DeNiro in a performance that marries mirrors to every fantasy he's been divorced from. Don't blink, it's gone faster than loss can lose.
Jagoda Szelc's Tower. A Bright Day. knows and unknows and always undoes. Just because it's ancient doesn't mean it's a demon. The world comes for us, despite our rituals. The performances, here, are lived-in and okay with dying. None of this art matters if there isn't some recognizable earth. Anna Krotoska is revealing and familiar in her demands and commands and reprimands, and makes this whole thing human. What a perfect film. Humanistic, animalistic, so known, so unknown. It only takes a moment. The abyss, the void, the hour of confession, the always of nature, the possessed second. Good goddamn.
Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning has a runtime that avails duration of its gospel. What an indictment of absolution. Witness is a weak viewfinder. One mirror turns to salt, one to stone. Fire is just trying to see itself. Sorry, I got drunk. Watch this film anyway. Sober up.
Like watching a road movie in an empty house, Andrea Pallaoro's Monica is, by design, clumsily American, and, by detail, a hermetic ballet. Patricia Clarkson loses half her grip to illness beautifully, and we see the angel that saves her and the devil that rescues. Emily Browning and Joshua Close do well with small untouched touches, and Adriana Barraza looks at something we can only see. But the film belongs, and is given, to Trace Lysette, whose performance is a summoned stillness, a balance of childlike return and transformed vanishment. The last scene matters to all, but only because it feels like a first time for us and for them.
Watching Park Ji-Min in Davy Chou's Return to Seoul is like hearing music that someone else doesn't, and then they hear it and you don't, and then you both hear it and both try to find where it's coming from, you split up, and the music stops. But you can't be sure. And you might be two people. And you might be alone.
Alice Diop's radiantly grey Saint Omer is some unwatched, new, unknowable spectacle. A stationary doom that travels back in time to change place. A doom that takes time with it. The film is full of transcript, detail, explanation. But its magic is not uttered, and says all the quiet parts in a found language. Its rooms, its bodies, its faces, make of image a plagiarist. Its distance gets inside. You'll stand, and feel returned.
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