kingsoftrain

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.

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Karim Ouelhaj's 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.

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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.

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Dustin Guy Defa's 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.

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Return has a future in Jagoda Szelc's Tower. A Bright Day. Just because it's ancient doesn't mean it's a demon. The world comes for us, despite our rituals. What is it about non-American performances that seem to be 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.

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What an indictment of absolution, is Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning. 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.

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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.