-
4 days ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Albert Serra’s first nonfiction film, Afternoons of Solitude, centers on Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey. Throughout, Serra’s approach involves not so much conveying information or telling a story as inducing a poetic trance. The film opens with a pair of arresting long takes, reflecting the two opponents that a torero faces in the “afternoon” of a traditional corrida. In each, a different bull looks into the camera, shrouded in a purgatorial or primaeval dusk.
-
3 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is less concerned with shedding light on its subject—the under-translated spouse of poet and Martiniquais politician Aimé Césaire—than with the quandaries involved in attempting to do so.
-
1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
Kana (Kawai Yumi), the protagonist of Desert of Namibia, doesn’t feel the emotions demanded of her in a society that measures her worth in relation to men. We first see the young laser hair-removal technician in a relationship with Honda (Kanichiro), who treats her as a dependent and for whom she feels no love. Her mother is Chinese, but, having grown up in Japan, Kama speaks only a few words of her mother’s native tongue, aggravating her sense of alienation.
-
2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | William Repass
With Invention, director Courtney Stephens and writer-actor Callie Hernandez tell a very “American” story.
-
2 months 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.
-
Mar 17, 2025 | 
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.
-
Mar 3, 2025 | 
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).
-
Feb 26, 2025 | 
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.
-
Feb 2, 2025 | 
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.
-
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.
