Erica Abeel
Both films are intermittently entertaining and display a high level of craft. They’re also blithely mediocre: mainly flash and filigree, vacuous at their center.
In “Nouvelle Vague,” director Richard Linklater thrillingly captures the sense of Jean-Luc Godard as an artist feeling his way in real time, as if in a dark room, toward a new vision.
“Father Mother Sister Brother” invites you into a space of present-ness where you need to slow down and re-set your metabolism. It invites you to tune out all the noise and sit with the silences between people. A daring ask in a digital world where everyone’s glued to their screens the better to pick up the noise.
“After the Hunt” churns up issues that feel several years behind the curve (hello 2007 and Harvey Weinstein).
It’s hard to imagine that Hollywood suits would get behind a movie focused on a corrupt political regime, even one that’s now history.
Bottom line: for all of “The Phoenician Scheme”‘s visual glories, the whimsical portrait of a shady arms dealer who becomes a mensch in the bosom of family rings hollow — especially at the present moment.
In “Anora,” director Sean Baker brilliantly sustains a hybrid tone, weaving together LOL comedy, sadness, and rage.
“The Zone of Interest” is a cinematic embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil.”
This is a Strindbergian dance to the death between a powerful, accomplished woman and a husband tormented by his own sense of failure.
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