With the narrative density of a Russian doorstop novel and the searing interpersonal insights of a psychology textbook, Saeed Roustaee’s astonishing, nearly-three-hour family epic cracks the teetering stilts that are currently propping up life in contemporary Tehran. There’s Steinbeck in there too in its depiction of poverty’s gross indignities and a system that works to constantly beat you away from...
Less gratuitous but similar to the psychology of Jamie Godard’s Toys Are Not for Children, Love According to Dalva explores the ways tenderness, sexuality, and paternal love intersect within a child. “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman,” are the stabbing words spoken by Dalva (Zelda Samson), a 12-year-old girl who wears heavy makeup, scrapes her hair into a bun...
It starts out as an ordinary day for Mia, a journalist and translator who works at a radio station in Paris. She takes her motorcycle to work; she meets her husband Vincent (Grégoire Colin) for dinner. When Vincent – a doctor at a local hospital – declares he has to leave early due to a work emergency, Mia is dejected,...
Leave it to João Pedro Rodrigues, the horniest scamp in all of Portugal, to coax out the roiling currents of homoeroticism that have always raged beneath the surface of the firefighting profession. It’s a pretty gay job: men with rippling, muscular physiques sleep next to one another in tiny beds, bare all in steam-filled locker rooms, and slide down thick,...
It may be one programmer’s predilections, it may be the disorienting experience of COVID and various quarantines finally making it into films, or perhaps it’s my own self-selection bias, but a trend is emerging at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A significant number of the lower profile films in the Official Selection mingle fantasy with reality, never fully giving way...
Human trafficking has figured frequently in the films of the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne since their breakthrough La Promesse, in 1996. It’s a subject suited to their philosophy, or philosophies—spiritual, political, aesthetic. The human commodity speaks to the imperiled status of the soul in the material world, while revealing the transactional web that structures society, in particular the...