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1 week ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
With Invention, director Courtney Stephens and writer-actor Callie Hernandez tell a very “American” story.
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2 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
In the 2010s, a coalition of farmers and eco-activists declared Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a commune in western France, a Zone to Defend (Z.A.D.) and occupied the region to block the construction of an airport. Over the next decade, they resisted multiple attempts by the state to evict them, attracting supporters in the tens of thousands, until Emmanuel Macron yielded to their demands in 2018.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Fleur Fortuné’s near-future-set feature-length directorial debut, The Assessment, prods at current-day anxieties around having children amid a recrudescence of fascism and dress rehearsals for the climate apocalypse. Even as these two forces refuse to recognize each other’s authority, they skip into the future hand in hand.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Shot in 16mm, Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me is an intimate, impressionistic adaptation of the “Sea Foam” section from Italian modernist poet Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. It’s one of several segments from Pavese’s 1947 book that stages a philosophical dialogue between figures of Greek mythology. “Sea Form” specifically imagines a conversation between Sappho (Gabriela Saidón), the lyric poet of Lesbos, and the mountain nymph Britomartis (María Villar).
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind. However intriguing its premise may be, the film becomes tedious in practice, as what few homegrown ideas it has to offer lack for substantial development. Built almost entirely on the very tropes that it sets out to undermine, The Empire mainly succeeds at hollowing out itself.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Set in rural west Ireland, writer-director Christopher Andrews’s pastoral thriller Bring Them Down features little in the way of spectacular set pieces. Neither does it hinge on a classic battle between a hero and a villain. Its genre bona bides are mostly established by its tightly wound plot and characters whose psychologies have been warped in the conjunction of patriarchal traditions and the pressures of capitalism.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Writer-director Tommaso Santambrogio’s Oceans Are the Real Continents follows three sets of characters living in the Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, located approximately 25 miles south of Havana. Puppeteer Edith (Edith Ibarra) and theater teacher Alex’s (Alexander Diego) marriage is troubled by Edith’s imminent departure for Italy. Fran (Frank Ernesto Lam) and Alain (Alain Alain Alfonso González), best friends on the cusp of puberty, dream of emigrating to play for the Yankees.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
In one of the narratives that directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw braid together in Gaucho Gaucho, their documentary on that much-represented Argentine figure, the mestizo horseman of the Pampas, a father teaching his son the gaucho tradition asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. A gaucho, the boy replies, “but a gaucho gaucho”—not a faux gaucho, that is, but a real one.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
In Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman’s farcical Dream Team, No (Esther Garrel) and Chase (Alex Zhang Hungtai), a pair of Interpol detectives as feckless as they are sexy, investigate a spate of surreal murders in Mexico. In this case, the murder weapon, if not the prime suspect, is a coral that emits a roseate, venomous gas.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Set at a restaurant that caters to tourists in Times Square, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, adapted from Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, revolves around Pedro (Raúl Briones), an undocumented Mexican line cook, and Julia (Rooney Mara), a white American working front of house. When $800 goes missing from the till, triggering an investigation by restaurant management, their love story derails.
