“Smooth, bulging, oiled, tatted, exposed: Denis Côté’s humane fascination with six bodybuilders tosses aside grandstanding and focuses on the odd duality of man and muscle. (…) True to his admirably eclectic approach, the maverick director weaves together portraits of six bodybuilders that push to the margins personal details and grand statements about the sport. More [...]
Hema Hema: Sing me a song while I wait
Jan Smacka2018-08-16T16:31:36+00:00“As the world’s only Buddhist lama who also makes movies that screen at major international festivals and have received commercial releases, Khyentse Norbu is quite the operator. Under his Buddhist name Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, he conducts sessions in India and his native Bhutan and, as he is thought to be the incarnation of 19th-century Buddhist [...]
Mrs. Fang
Jan Smacka2018-08-16T16:32:22+00:00“Who is Mrs. Fang? At the beginning of the Locarno Golden Leopard-winning documentary that bears her name, she is a Chinese woman in her sixties waiting in a hallway. (…) Then across a single, brutal cut, we’re with her some months later, and she now occupies one of the beds. Her advanced Alzheimer’s has shriveled [...]
Good Luck
Jan Smacka2018-08-16T16:34:22+00:00“There is a symbol at the beginning, middle and end of Good Luck. It is a simple geometric circle with a horizontal line evenly separating top from bottom. Does it represent above ground and below; Northern and Southern Hemispheres; Ying and Yang; daylight and darkness? It could be any one of these or all of [...]
Phantasiesätze
Jan Smacka2018-03-29T10:15:39+00:00“In the late 1920s, Walter Benjamin played a game with a 11-year-old girl. He would give her a few words, not less than five, not more than ten. She was then supposed to forge sentences out of these lexical groups, to give order to the arbitrary, to generate sense. The phrases she came up with [...]
Freiheit
Jan Smacka2018-08-16T16:36:40+00:00“For his second feature film, German filmmaker Jan Speckenbach is tackling familiar material, with a twist. In Speckenbach’s first feature Die Vermissten, a father goes searching for his estranged — and now missing — daughter and is shocked by what he finds along the way. In his Freedom Speckenbach appears to be working through a [...]
Lucky
Jan Smacka2018-08-16T16:37:39+00:00“Everything Harry Dean Stanton has done in his career, and his life, has brought him to his moment of triumph in Lucky, an unassumingly wonderful little film about nothing in particular and everything that’s important. Scripters Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja wrote their screenplay with Stanton in mind as the title character, and they embellished their [...]
The Dreamed Path
Jan Smacka2018-08-17T12:02:37+00:00“Two couples suffer the failure of their relationships 30 years apart. Director Angela Schanelec’s bisected narrative is a quietly beautiful meditation on love, loneliness, and happiness just out of reach. Rigorous, intelligent, and formally beautiful, her work deals with notions of chance and transience, the complexity (and frequent opacity) of human relations defying the dictates [...]
Scarred Hearts
Jan Smacka2018-08-17T12:04:52+00:00“Contemporary Romanian cinema is usually identified by moody, real-time dramas about modern social dysfunction. Radu Jude’s recent work offers a notable exception: With last year’s “Aferim!”, a black comedy set in the 19th century about a Roman officer and his son transporting a Gypsy slave, Jude cast a wider net to explore Romanian identity through [...]
Winter Song
Jan Smacka2018-08-17T12:11:23+00:00“Satire and surrealism meet in Otar Iosseliani’s delightful “Winter Song”. (…) Moments after raping and pillaging an entire war-torn town, soldiers from some unnamed battalion gather in silence around a piano, surrounded by empty wreckage, as one of the men plays a solemn tune. Then they’re baptized. In another time and place, protestors are carted [...]