Tropical Malady is the crossroads of Apichatpong's filmography, the well from which everything after it sprung and the bay into which everything before it disembarked. We have oral storytelling like in Mysterious Object, we have the introduction of Uncle...
The forlorn pair in The Hole walk through places that need people in order to operate. The apartment complex or the market: their very purpose entails inhabitants, buyers, sellers, small business owners. That we rarely glimpse any of them...
A deadpan movie, which begins with a series of unpretentious shots of talking faces, slowly turns into a low-budget spectacular, as the images on the screen are impregnated with film history. Near the end, swamped in fugitive references, A...
Like my favorite film, also released in 1939, Renoir's The Rules of the Game, this movie feels so modern, so fresh, and so new, that its date of release seems like some sort of ruse, a trick played on...
The movie opens with a sword held at a forty-five degree angle pointing at the mossy ground. Then the knight holding the sword swings slowly at his opponent and severs his head and then the decapitated victim falls to...
Seen in a single sitting, a film like this, with all its branching paths and anecdotal asides, all its subterranean currents and linked characters, the whole verbal spill of the thing, all of it plunges down on us as...
The horse is immense. It drags the carriage against the perpetual wind, its eyes agitated and delirious, each step perhaps its last, and yet it keeps moving, muscles tensing and relaxing as it gallops to the portentous rhythm of...
This is mind-clearing stuff, a sparse and immediate film that focuses directly on what it is about without clutter or extraneous filling: the guttural, animalistic sprint for survival undergone by an escaped terrorist, presented with little back-story and almost...
Aurora is not so much slow as it is alert to details that lie outside plot and context. There is a passage in Uruguayan critic David Oubiña's wonderful book A Philosophical Toystore in which he describes how, while watching...
This film is soaked in the cool machismo of its characters. It flows like a clever turn of phrase, like punchy slang, like a barrage of adjectives. It gestures with street-savvy swagger. The camera flies, stops, stares, makes ironic...
Review: The Future (2011)
Review: The Puppetmaster (1993)
Review: The Tree Of Life (2011)
Review: Happythankyoumoreplease (2010)
Review: Mystic River (2003)
