Arturo knows exactly when he was conceived: December 10, 1969, the day of the Viale Lazio massacre, which took place just down the street from his parents’ home in Palermo. The mafia affects everyone’s life, declares Arturo, and he maintains that the only reason he was born at all is because most of his father’s sperm was scared…
Mike (Armie Hammer) is a Marine sniper sent to the middle of nowhere in a vague Middle Eastern location to take out an enemy target. He and fellow Marine Tommy (Tom Cullen), his spotter and alleged best friend, locate the man in question at a wedding, along with several attendees and well-armed bodyguards, but their intel doesn’t…
Set in the streets of Manila, Blanka (Hasei, 2015) tells the story of a young street kid searching for a home. Abandoned by a drunk mother and deadbeat father, Blanka (Cydel Gabutero) strolls the streets bumming spare change and, when opportunity strikes, thieving from inattentive tourists. She has courage and determination beyond her age, borne of her difficult circumstances. But, regardless of the hard outer layer she has developed, she is still merely a little girl…
Francesco Munzi’s Black Souls (Anime nere) is an unflinching tale of one family’s prolonged descent into Hell. Three brothers, all involved in the Calabrian crime syndicate known as the ‘Ndrangheta in various ways, clash in what at first seems to be a standard, if evocative, crime drama. Soon, however, we realized that the film’s swift navigation through a series of seemingly unrelated incidents, from stealing goats to organizing international drug deals, is peeling away …
To see one of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs for the first (or even the 100th time) is to be instantly, irrevocably moved, instantly transported to a vastly different, vastly alien time and place. Primarily known as a “social photographer” (a chronicler of people more than places), Salgado has carved out a remarkable career spanning five decades and practically every continent, winning international awards and recognition with each new, years-spanning …
Rarely have words the heft of László Krasznahorkai’s: the Hungarian author, whose dystopian tomes manifest in technique and tone the terrifying banality with which we crawl toward death, doesn’t so much tell stories as intone them, the incessant trudge of his behemoth sentences rendering the …
Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema is not only the cinema of class-afforded ennui, of works that see languor as a byproduct of privilege, an offshoot of life stripped of its most innate anxieties, but also the cinema of time, of its erosive effects on memory and other such mental constructs, which, gossamer in nature ….
Fasten Your Seatbelts is billed as a comedy / drama, or “dramedy”, a sub-genre that seems to crop up increasingly often. For the majority of the film this is certainly the case as two inherently oppositely inclined people are unavoidably drawn to each other by a mutual attraction that neither understand or initially wants…
Based on journalist Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 essay, Emptying the Skies is a harrowing account of the decimation of migratory songbirds in the Mediterranean. Millions of birds are killed every year and many species are at risk of extinction. Though as recently as the last century, they were an important part of the …
Equally a caustic encapsulation of celebrity culture and a confessional of one’s more-cultivating-than-complicit role in it, Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita is the work of an artist at odds not with the professional system in which he works but with the state of cultural decline that certain parasitic vocations – his lead and …