“The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded” — Ralph Waldo Emerson In Lucrecia Martel’s masterfully hypnotic Zama, the sensuous and seductive Luciana Pinares de Lueñga (Lola Dueñas, “Can’t Say Goodbye”) says that “Europe is best remembered by those who were never there.” If Zama is any indication, we might…
Many filmgoers became aware of the infamous power grab of Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, a radical leftist group whose legacy included the direct killing (via execution) or indirect (via universal forced labor and food shortages), of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Cambodians in the 1970s (the subject of the film “The…
“Certain persons in the world exist, not as personalities in themselves, but as spots or specks on the personalities of others” — N. V. Gogol, “Dead Souls” A Gentle Creature is as Russian a creature can ever be. It is the kind of character-driven story where the protagonist is bereft of all possible character —…
Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and Israel’s submission to the 2018 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s (“Lebanon”) brilliant and confounding Foxtrot reveals itself less by narrative than by images: A narrow road in an empty stretch of desert, a lonely camel meandering through a…
“Gantz” is a 37-volume manga series written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku from 2000-2013, whose worldwide distribution has sold an excess of over 20 million copies. Hallmarked by its sexual overtones and sadistically gory aesthetic in tandem with deep sociological, psychological and anthropological themes dissecting morality, it is considered one of the most controversial seinen…
It is fitting that there are two competing readings of François Ozon’s Double Lover. The film dually presents as a highly stylized, seductively sleek French psychosexual thriller and this “I Know Who Killed Me”-esque overtly overly symbolic camp. Not wanting to assign one dominance over the other or perhaps unable to distinguish between apparent equals,…
Following the release of “Lady Bird,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote a moving essay on the supporting roles of mothers in relation to their daughters’ central stories entitled “Moms Are Main Characters Too.” Petersen writes, “But something you learn after high school is that, without the momentousness of ‘firsts’ . . . and societally ordained milestones…
