Keith Uhlich

Oct 7, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Keith Uhlich

History unfolds with on-the-ground immediacy in director Julia Loktev’s first feature since 2011’s The Loneliest Planet, as well as her second nonfiction work after 1998’s Moment of Impact. Running five-and-a-half hours and split into five chapters, My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow chronicles the hardscrabble efforts and eventual exile of a group of young Russian journalists who work for the independent news channel TV Rain.

Oct 7, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Keith Uhlich

Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burrough’s second novel, Queer, begins, shall we say, peculiarly. Sinéad O’Connor’s haunting cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” scores overhead shots of what we soon realize is Burroughs’s own writing space, every object (a typewriter, drug paraphernalia, hastily scattered pages, an abundance of handguns) alluding with cringey literalness to the Beat Generation author’s thorny mythos.

Sep 23, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Keith Uhlich

An eventful week in the waning days of a medieval English village provides the narrative backbone for Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s moody-verging-on-mopish adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel of the same name. The book is written in a bewitching prose style somewhere between a monologue and a first-person essay.

Aug 11, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Keith Uhlich |Jake Cole

George Miller gets biblical in the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment in his postapocalyptic action franchise. The young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) picks a ripe piece of fruit from a tree growing at the edge of a verdant forest. “We’ve come too far,” says her companion, emphasizing the forbidden nature of the act with the perfect amount of allegorical on-the-noseness.

May 28, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Keith Uhlich

Writer-director Chris Nash’s feature directorial debut, In a Violent Nature, opens in eerie serenity, with a gorgeously layered image of a forest seen through a deteriorated window frame. Birdsong and gentle breezes take aural precedence, though there are off-screen human voices of an evidently teen-to-twentysomething variety that clash discordantly with all the verdant beauty. The camera eventually tracks laterally, rack-focusing to reveal a locket hanging around a pipe.