Hale County: This Morning, This Evening Is A Transportive Avant-Garde Type of Documentary

If you're a pleb like me, you were likely puzzled by at least one documentary nominated for Best Documentary Feature in the 91st Academy Awards ceremony that went by the name of Hale County: This Morning, This Evening. It was a nomination thought of as surprising far and wide simply due to the low profile of the film (Hale County has never played in more than 8 movie theaters in its domestic box office run), though thankfully PBS put the documentary up on their website for a week so that individuals like myself who were unaware of the existence of this film could finally catch up and see what all the fuss was about.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Is An Utterly Unique And Transfixing Feature

I know it'll sound a pretentious descriptor on par with "It's really a tone poem" or "The city is a character unto itself", but it does feel appropriate for me to note that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives feels more like a dream mixed with a fairy tale than it does a traditional piece of cinema. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2010 motion picture heavily utilizes the more abstract and fantastical nature that most dreams and fairy tales have with aplomb to create something thoroughly unpredictable (one can never tell just what heightened imagery the next scene might bring) as well as something emotionally powerful on an intimate level too, which, come to think of it, is where many particularly memorable fairy tales and even dreams tend to resonate.