The exotically disturbing character-driven Dutch drama Meat (a.k.a. “Vlees”) is most definitely not your old-fashioned grandmother’s tenderloin steak of a sexual psychological thriller. Filmmakers Victor Nieuwenhuijs and Maartje Seyferth (who also is credited as a co-screenwriter along with consultant scriber Stan Lapinski) literally and figuratively leads the wide-eyed lamb to the slaughter in this twisted,…
“A fulfilled dream is a disappointed dream” — Amos Oz In a quiet moment in Natalie Portman’s (“Knight of Cups”) beautiful and poetic A Tale of Love and Darkness, a mother says to her young son, “If you have to choose between telling a lie or insulting someone, choose to be generous.” When the boy…
It’s tough to make a religious film in 2016. Not that they aren’t produced anymore, far from it, but that their demographic continues to diminish. An increasingly secularized temperament in the world today means the topic of religion or spirituality in cinema becomes discussed in ever more derisive ways. For audiences, it was difficult to…
Writer-director Jayro Bustamante’s absorbing and revealing debut feature, Ixcanul, paints a disturbing portrait that crosses the fine line between tradition and exploitation in the name of the Guatemalan children sacrificed to uphold economical expectations among other considerations. The indigenous existences of children globally are jeopardized through ritualistic justifications that many find vehemently inexcusable and horrifying….
In Der Bunker, a young student heads to an isolated home to carry out research in solitude. When he arrives, however, he finds that the lake-view home is actually a bunker. That turns out to be the least weird turn of events in the film, a gleefully oddball drama-comedy that seems to crib from both…
Winner of two major awards at the 2014 Venice Film Festival and India’s official entry for Best Foreign Film at the 2016 Oscars, 28-year-old Chaitanya Tamhane’s first feature, Court, is not a typical courtroom drama but a devastating look at the failings of the judicial system in India. Portrayed by mostly non-professional actors, the film…
According to military historian Antony Beevor, “The subject of the Red Army’s mass rapes in Germany and elsewhere in Europe has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened.” A Soviet war correspondent has said that, “It was an army of rapists,” that Russian soldiers raped every female…
