Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.
10.09.2020 - 22:51 / hollywoodreporter.com
An accidental death in the family turns the lives of five orphaned sisters upside down in The Macaluso Sisters (Le sorelle Macaluso), the second of Emma Dante’s theatrical works to be filmed by the author and playwright. The story is set in lower middle-class Sicily, where five young women struggle to fend for themselves in a big apartment overlooking the sea.
Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.
Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, one of Venice’s two Career Golden Lion recipients this year alongside Tilda Swinton, brings prewar Hong Kong to exquisite if restrained life in her latest historical drama, Love After Love (Di Yu Lu Xiang).
Making a movie about our age’s self(ie)-obsessed culture that riffs on the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water, seems like quite an obvious move. But only queer Canadian iconoclast Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, L.A.
There are still idealistic young writers out there aiming to transform the world, at least in China, and the newsroom drama The Best Is Yet to Come (Bu zhi bu xiu) catches the viewer up in the fast-paced story of an untutored youth from the provinces who breaks a scoop on hepatitis B.
Inching forward on a rocky if deeply felt cinematic path that has rarely strayed far from reflections on himself and his mother, Azerbaijan filmmaker Hilal Baydarov opens up his vistas, somewhat, in the fiction feature In Between Dying (Sepelenmis Olumler Arasinda). It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.
In her two previous features, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, Chloé Zhao established a spiritual connection to the American West, with its immense skies and wide-open landscapes that speak equally of desolate solitude and of freedom. Working primarily with nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, she specializes in stories carved into the bones of her characters, their communities and the remotes spaces they inhabit.
The day before Ted Bundy's execution, at his request he spoke with psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, an expert witness for his defense, for more than four hours. Of all the professionals he'd dealt with in the three and a half years since his arrest, he felt that she was the one who was interested in the why rather than the how of his murderous deeds.
It's been 17 years since Gus Van Sant stunned and polarized audiences with Elephant, his transfixing, oddly lyrical response to the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, a national tragedy now almost normalized by the sickening frequency of mass shootings that have continued to stain American soil. A number of films in the years since have reflected on school shootings in provocative ways, among them We Need to Talk About Kevin, And Then I Go and Vox Lux.
Anyone who has spent time in a major international metropolis with a luxury shopping precinct catering to the highest income bracket will be shaken by the startling image of a massive Louis Vuitton flagship store — in this case on Mexico City's chic Avenida Presidente Masaryk — splashed with the symbolic green paint of a protest movement, the ground nearby littered with corpses not yet cold.
It’s not easy to grab hold of Julia von Heinz’s And Tomorrow the Entire World (Und morgen die ganze Welt), an attempt to describe what motivates a young political activist of the German nobility to embrace the warm chaos of a social commune, where she mulls over the use of violence in the class struggle with like-minded souls.
Set in 1940 in Kobe, Japan, with an epilogue during the bombing of the city in 1945, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intriguingly titled Wife of a Spy (Spy no Tsuma) bookends the Second World War in an absorbing, exotic, well-paced thriller with moments of disconcerting realism and horror. Its spot in Venice competition is a well-earned promotion for the director after his many accolades for films like Kairo, Tokyo Sonata and Before We Vanish.
Haifa, a port city in Israeli, is famous for its mixture of Arabs and Israelis, making it an ideal location for inter-cultural dramas. Well-known Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, who hails from the city, aims to make the most of it in Laila in Haifa, wherehe brings a hip bunch of contemporary Israelis and Palestinians together in mixed couples.
The three children of a poor Portuguese couple (Lucia Moniz and Ruben Garcia) living in London are forcibly removed from their home by social services, raising questions about responsible parenting and duty of care in director Ana Rocha de Sousa's emotive feature debut Listen. Although the script by Rocha de Sousa, Paula Vaccaro and Aaron Brookner tries to be at least a little bit balanced, the rules-obsessed authorities don’t come out of it well.
At a time when America looks like it's tearing apart at the seams, there’s something altogether reassuring — even downright inspiring — about Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, City Hall, which chronicles municipal life in his old hometown of Boston.
In Night of the Kings (La Nuit des rois), a young man thrown into the infamous La Maca prison in Cote d’Ivoire is forced to invent a story that lasts until sunrise or face the consequences like some kind of modern-day Scheherazade.
With a compassionate eye for the downtrodden that has characterized all Gianfranco Rosi’s work, Notturno brings three years of shooting in Middle East war zones to the screen in an impressionistic collage of ordinary people caught up in conflict.
The scene is nighttime, a rented house in Beverly Hills, the only sources of light a few hurricane lamps and a fireplace blaze. An offscreen interviewer sets the conversation in motion, apologizing for kicking things off with "a real heavy question." The unseen speaker is Orson Welles, his voice booming with authority, and as he spars with Dennis Hopper over the next two-plus hours, there are no light questions, no easy lobs.
A girl living between countries and cultures, and between adolescence and adulthood, tries to come into her own in the Franco-Algerian coming-of-age drama Honey Cigar (Cigare au miel). This is the debut feature from filmmaker Kamir Ainouz and if that name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s the half-sister — and near-homophone — of Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Ainouz.
Emptiness and longing afflict the sad residents of a wealthy gated community outside an ugly Polish city, until a mysterious visitor arrives offering massages with his strong, healing hands. At that point they realize what is missing from their lives and find it almost within their grasp.
The social turmoil in Italy from the 1960s to the 1980s is remembered for its many acts of political terrorism, and these “Years of Lead,” as they are known, are at the heart of director Claudio Noce’s third feature, Padrenostro. This very national drama is likely to feel disconcerting to those who remember the period, because it makes no attempt to confront terrorism or review the motivations and ideologies of the protagonists, or its effect on the society at large.