RSS Parrot

Alpha. — Jan-Willem van Ewijk [Venice ’24 Review]

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/06/alpha-jan-willem-van-ewijk/

Published: September 6, 2024 15:44

On the surface, Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s Alpha. falls into the trap set out by most contemporary European festival circuit films. It’s a movie about alienation and grief, emphasized through towering cinematography and a strained central…

Boomerang — Shahab Fotouhi [Venice ’24 Review]

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/06/boomerang/

Published: September 6, 2024 15:33

The name most likely to catch the attention of cinephiles in the credits of Shahab Fotouhi’s first feature Boomerang is co-editor Aleksandre Koberidze, who broke out in 2021 with his film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? The two films both begin…

The Deliverance — Lee Daniels

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/06/the-deliverance/

Published: September 6, 2024 15:24

The first thing you need to understand about The Deliverance is that said deliverance is different from an exorcism — no intercessor is needed. At least, that’s what the film clumsily announces at one point, either a shrug of an effort to differentiate…

The Thicket — Elliot Lester

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/06/the-thicket/

Published: September 6, 2024 13:20

For people of a certain age, author Joe R. Lansdale will likely always be best known as the writer of some of the best Jonah Hex comic books of the ’90s, a series of horror-tinged Western escapades that mixed and matched genre signposts with thrilling…

Moving Portraits: An Interview with Stephen Soucy

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/06/moving-portraits-an-interview-with-stephen-soucy/

Published: September 6, 2024 13:00

To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the film is largely of conversations with James Ivory, now in his 96th…

City of Dreams — Mohit Ramchandani

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/06/city-of-dreams/

Published: September 6, 2024 12:45

Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a young Mexican teenager’s miserable journey from his home country to the the miserable existence of a Los…

Youth (Homecoming) — Wang Bing

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/05/youth-homecoming/

Published: September 5, 2024 15:45

Analyzing a Wang Bing is never such a small feat, regardless of length; and Youth (Homecoming), the final entry in the director’s Youth trilogy, premiering at Venice following similar premieres for Hard Times (225 mins) and Spring (212 mins) at Locarno…

Rebel Ridge — Jeremy Saulnier

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/05/rebel-ridge/

Published: September 5, 2024 15:07

Jeremy Saulnier’s new thriller Rebel Ridge doesn’t waste a moment of time getting wound up. Immediately, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, in a terrific performance that ought to make him a star) gets knocked off his bike by a patrol car while heading into a…

My First Film — Zia Anger

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/05/my-first-film/

Published: September 5, 2024 14:46

Six years ago Zia Anger’s live cinema presentation My First Film (from which the film My First Film is adapted) sparked a fire around her name. It was as much a one-woman show as it was a film, Anger using the tools of 21st-century technology to give her…

The Cowboy and the Queen — Andrea Nevins

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/05/the-cowboy-and-the-queen/

Published: September 5, 2024 14:25

Queen Elizabeth II’s love of horses is well known. She even made the trek to Kentucky five separate times during her reign to visit various horse stables, and attended the Kentucky Derby in 2007. Less known is her relationship with horse trainer Monty…

Red Rooms — Pascal Plante

https://inreviewonline.com/2023/09/04/red-rooms/

Published: September 4, 2024 14:45

In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse — only by Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible that year. The controversy bespoke radicality, and that radicality…

Taxi Monamour — Ciro De Caro [Venice ’24 Review]

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/04/taxi-monamour/

Published: September 4, 2024 14:31

In the opening scene of Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, the film introduces one of its two heroines in a hospital clinic: a young Italian waitress Anna (Rosa Palasciano) who, as the film hints, suffers from some chronic illness. The the film’s other primary…

Apollo 13: Survival — Peter Middleton

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/04/apollo-13-survival/

Published: September 4, 2024 13:42

There’s a reason spacecrafts are often the setting of horror stories: they are the ultimate locked room. No matter what threatens you inside, there is literal and instant death waiting on the outside. But this threat isn’t just present in the world of…

Keep Tugging That Yarn: A Conversation with Courtney Stephens & Callie Hernandez

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/03/keep-tugging-that-yarn-a-conversation-with-courtney-stephens-callie-hernandez/

Published: September 3, 2024 16:14

Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez premiered their new film, Invention, at Locarno last month, not quite sure what kind of life or reception it would receive. Of course, no one can predict a new film’s reception, but in the case of Invention, which…

AfrAId — Chris Weitz

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/03/afraid-chris-weitz/

Published: September 3, 2024 15:32

From HAL’s unrelenting utilitarianism to Demon Seed’s Proteus longing for physical form beyond its servers to Margeaux’s desire to understand humans completely by murdering them in different ways, there’s a long line of films in which a purportedly helpful…

Hoard — Luna Carmoon

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/02/hoard/

Published: September 2, 2024 16:04

Cinema certainly offers no shortly of coming-of-age films, yet very rarely do any of them rise above qualified praise to break the mold and stand out as an exceptional piece of work. Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Julia Ducournau’s Raw, two of the best if…

Cloud — Kiyoshi Kurosawa [Venice ’24 Review]

https://inreviewonline.com/2024/09/02/cloud/

Published: September 2, 2024 15:33

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies of work from a veteran filmmaker, one as dedicated to remixing his own work in late…