For the most part, its animation is the primary thing taken away from the overall production. Short films are a tricky form of filmmaking to create as brevity can risk the resonance to its own story. While undoubtedly amusing for its brief run time, but whether it will be remembered shortly after screening is uncertain at best.
Undoubtedly, Cannes produces a showcase selection of films considered artistic or valuable, but it also incurs the inevitable backlash. As such, being the winner of the Palme d’Or in the short film category, it’s impossible to respond to Timecode without fastidious scrutiny.
School movies, as a general rule of thumb, can usually be counted on to feature either an inspirational teacher or a terrible one. There’s little room for in-between. Kristóf Deák’s dramatic short Sing (Mindenki) opts for the latter, telling the tale of a kids’ school choir in Budapest that’s run by perfectionist singing teacher, Miss…
The end of the world is a lonely proposition in Lluís Quílez’s grim 30-minute short Graffiti, about a single survivor in a post-apocalyptic city who wanders around the shell of an empty apartment complex with his dog in search of food, people, anything. Edgar (Oriol Pla, “Year of Grace”) doesn’t have a lot to live…
Two bad decisions irrevocably alter the lives of two families when a pair of police officers pull over a suspicious vehicle on a forest road in Felix Ahrens’ taut, tense, terrific short Where the Woods End. What first seems simple shatters into several jagged pieces of moral complexity, all because the driver of the pulled-over…
It’s an uncomfortably heavy 13-minute stretch that Konrad Tho Fiedler fills in Running Eagle to tell the brief, though highly evocative tale of a young Native American woman (Devery Jacobs, “Rhymes for Young Ghouls”) struggling to get back home across a frozen wasteland after fleeing a life of forced prostitution. The narrative is split between…
Films centering around the American military generally fall into two camps: Pro-war and anti-war. The U.S. military will always be a subject of extremely dichotomized opinions and, as such, films revolving around a soldier will generate polarizing reactions depending on its approach and on an individual’s personal beliefs. Where Birthday lies between these opposing sides…
