loneliness
Rafaela Sales Ross’ coverage of the 2021 Venice Film Festival commences with a look at Harry Wootliff’s True Things.
Ammonite is a cold, distant viewing that rewards the viewer in sporadic intervals, confident that it will find the right audience.
Princess Rita is a film of subtle contrasts that distracts from a storyline that could easily be told as a cautionary tale of internet naivety.
Fleabag portrays love in such a unique, true way that it takes several watchings to fully understand the depth of it. Are love and attention the same thing?
We examine how Gloria Bell is disenchanted with L.A., transforming the unhappiness with the city into a dissatisfaction with the American dream.
Streamer is a tense, intimate and at times stunning feature that ultimately derails in its very final moments.
Racism in France has been a long-discussed topic within cinema, from Mathieu Kassovitz’s eponymous film La Haine to 2011’s hit comedy Les Intouchables. In recent days Muslim/Arab citizens have been the focus of racial prejudice from the French justice system; Fatima could not come at a better time with its refreshing take on Arab/French culture. Philippe Faucon adds to this conversation with a portrayal of racial tension in France.
Director Yorgo Lanthimos first grabbed the world’s attention with Alps and the seismic Dogtooth. Recently, he sprung another biting, absurdist satire into the festival circuit with The Lobster. It takes place in a world in which relationships are mandatory; the characters, all newly single, or newly of age, are detained in a hotel that works, basically, as a deadly speed dating service.
Comedy is a tricky thing; it’s hyper-subjective and typically draws from dark elements to create laughter. The search for one’s own comedy is thus, in a sense, the result of grappling some of the least desirable aspects of the human experience and wrangling it into something with a punchline. This is why the cliché of the “sad clown” is so prevalent and continues to be perpetuated to this day, such as with Marc Maron’s self-loathing diatribes and the tag posthumously attributed to Robin Williams.
Breaking the boarders with transnational themes and making people cry and laugh in the same way? Genre as a global system? Why not!
Here is an interesting thought: Al Pacino is having something of a career renaissance. His last three major roles, including this year’s Manglehorn, are as far away from the go-to gangster’s early movies as can be.
About 20 minutes into A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the local drug dealer, Saeed (Dominic Rains), takes a girl (Shelia Vand) back to his flat. His place is pretty pimped out. Think a toned-down version of Alien’s crib in Spring Breakers – the mounted animal heads, the fur carpets and nice furniture, the suitcase filled with drug money and coke lined up on the glass table next to it.
The first time I saw Chungking Express, I didn’t realize what love was. An over-dramatic statement, but Wong Kar-Wai films are truly worth viewing. It’s about the human condition in terms of emotional separation from each other.
