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6 days ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood, exemplified most movingly by Anna Torrent’s wide-eyed curiosity and generosity to watching Frankenstein in Victor Erice’s haunting The Spirit of the Beehive?
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
Titles are a funny thing. Adapted from a 2020 novel of the same name, Eli Craig’s horror-comedy Clown in a Cornfield takes the same tact as recent genre films Death of a Unicorn and Cocaine Bear in using its title to dispel any mystery of what it might be about, while also signaling a somewhat flippant disposition.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
One of the more welcome upsets in recent cinema history occurred in 2022, when Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles unseated Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the top choice on Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list, a critic-polled survey conducted decennially.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out of reused footage from an earlier and shorter Oda film called Gama, which ran for a mere 53 minutes. Fittingly for a film that is always building shapes and forms out of lights in the dark, Oda’s ideas of the underground range from the obvious caves and subway tunnels to cinema theaters and dark exhibition rooms showing non-narrative art.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out of reused footage from an earlier and shorter Oda film called Gama, which ran for a mere 53 minutes. Fittingly for a film that is always building shapes and forms out of lights in the dark, Oda’s ideas of the underground range from the obvious caves and subway tunnels to cinema theaters and dark exhibition rooms showing non-narrative art.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
It’s been eight years since The Raid director Gareth Evans served as the man behind the camera on a feature film (that would be 2018’s goth horror Apostle) and five since he’s directed anything at all (the first five episodes of the blisteringly violent Brit-gangster series Gangs of London).
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined oppressive forces of religion and patriarchy slowly but surely crushing the spirit of a depressed, devout woman, that threatens to expand not only her worldview but also the film’s.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
If you know anything at all about French director François Ozon, then you realize just how little we know about him. Sure, we have all the standard biographical details, but as a filmmaker, he has been all over the place, making dozens of films that usually don’t look very much like one another. Granted, early films like Criminal Lovers and Water Drops on Burning Rocks display a deep commitment to Fassbinder’s brand of mannered dramatics and radical sexual energy.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
What can be done with the anger that tragedy bears? Brett Neveu wrote Eric LaRue for the stage in the wake of the Columbine massacre, when mass shootings at U.S. schools felt like something of an unspeakable novelty. Neveu’s play, which follows a mother named Janice in the months after her son shot and killed three of his classmates, was bleary in the face of an open wound, a beleaguered admission that there was no making sense of all this.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
There are few genuinely pleasurable elements in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. Adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name, the film’s story of mid-century queer life is a crushingly timid homage to the sweeping Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s: thematically didactic, straight-faced, and visually conventional.
