The Outstanding Cinematography Of Foxtrot Alone Makes This A Movie Worth Seeing

The camera is constantly on the move in Foxtrot, which isn't normally a visual characteristic you'd imagine would be applied to a quiet drama about coping with past transgressions. Many similar films go for a restrained style of camerawork that can work beautifully for their specific stories but who's to say the opposite approach also can't work like gangbusters? One size does not fit all, as they say, and Foxtrot demonstrates just how fitting more active camerawork can be to certain small-scale stories about human grief and remorse. Going for this approach means Foxtrot gets to have some truly remarkable cinematography that serves as an outstanding visual compliment to its thoughtful father/son story.

The Original Godzilla Has Some Weak Lead Characters But An Impressively Realized Ominous Tone

If you had told any of the members of the cast and crew of the original 1954 Godzilla film that what they were working on would end up being one of the most influential features of the 20th century, they likely would have thought you were batty at best. But that's just what happened, as a somber exercise in contemplating the consequences of nuclear warfare through the prism of a monster movie turned out to be something that resonated with audiences across the globe to such a profound point that the monstrous Godzilla is still making new movies in both his home country of Japan and in the United States of America.

Fritz Lang's M Harrowingly Shows A Society In Chaos In The Face of Daunting Tragedy

Some movies are declared to be character studies, but Fritz Lang's 1931 feature M strikes me more as a larger-scale societal study. Though individual characters are found throughout the story, M is more concerned with examining how individual large pockets of society react to the prospect of terror occuring in their midst rather than just focusing on how one person reacts to such horrifying circumstances. Specifically, those horrifying circumstances are that someone in the city of Berlin, Germany is kidnapping and killing children. This is a tragedy that sends all of the residents of Berlin, Germany into a frenzy as they try to figure out who exactly could be behind such vicious slayings, with the police officers and the criminal syndicates of this town each having their own agendas in wanting to bring this killer to justice.

A Fantastic Woman Is A Fantastic Motion Picture

Hailing from director Sebastian Leilo, A Fantastic Woman is the most recent winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, with its victory nearly a month ago cementing it as the first Chilena film in history to win that prestigious award. That put the motion picture and its star, Daniela Vega (who was also a presenter at this year's Oscars ceremony), on many people's radars. For those eager to know if A Fantastic Woman is indeed living up to the hype it's generated, I can say confidently that A Fantastic Woman (my first foray into the world of Chilean cinema) is indeed a great movie on its own terms.

The Process of Cristian Mungiu's Graduation Is Not Without Dire Consequences

How far would you go to help your child? It's a moral quandary that comes up a lot in movies, but typically such movies face that question in the form of a thriller or an action movie (the latter type of presentation typically stars Liam Neeson). For Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's newest movie Graduation, he decides to explore this question in the confines of a grim drama, one that's heavy on realistic conversations and bleak storytelling. Graduation follows the lengths a father will go to in order to help his child not by showing the father fighting off an army of kidnappers but rather by trying to get his child into a good college so that she can have a better future.

Live In The Chaotic And Gruesome Here And Now With Nocturama

There isn't much in the way of background established for the lead characters of Nocturama in its opening scenes. We just get to follow a handful of college-aged young adults going about assorted pieces of business, with only minimal amounts of accompanying of dialogue, with this array of individuals occasionally bumping into each other amidst their routines before it's revealed that they're all in some kind of close-knit group together. There's a subtly intense vibe created here, an undercurrent of espionage that director Bertrand Bonello is able to sew into the fabric of seemingly mundane sequences.

Loving Vincent Paints An Intriguing Portrait of An Iconic Painter

 

Hand-drawn animations woefully low presence on the American film scene has seen a mild form of a reprieve this year thanks to The Red Turtle, Your Name. and now the Vincent Van Gogh tribute Loving Vincent, which is brought to life entirely by watercolor paintings that have been created by around 115 painters. Yep, the entire film is rendered through the distinctive art style that Van Gogh was famous for. Interestingly, Vincent Van Gogh is already dead when Loving Vincent gets its story started which takes place shortly after the iconic painters demise and has Van Gogh's mailman, Postman Roulin (Chris O'Dowd) entrusting his son Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) to return the letter to Vincent's brother.

Get In Tune With The Captivating Humanistic Beat Of BPM (Beats Per Minute)

What do you do when your government has abandoned you? What do you do when the pharmaceutical companies meant to create cures for what's killing you instead lollygag around? For those suffering from AIDS at the dawn of the 1990's, this could not be tolerated. Millions of lives had already been lost to this disease that was ravaging the worldwide population and yet those in power seemed to have made little to no progress in trying to help the sick and weary. Thus, the ACT UP group was started to champion the rights of AIDS-suffering individuals across the globe. BPM (Beats Per Minute) is all about following an ACT UP group located in Paris, France comprised of an eclectic coterie of people.

It's Hip To Be Square In Ruben Ostlund's Successfully Uncomfortable Dark Comedy The Square

The modern-day idea of art being created solely for the sake of pushing people's buttons has taken on a negative connotation and that's really not unwarranted. You've got countless animated and live-action TV shows trying to ape the bawdy humor of the likes of South Park and Family Guy whose only concept of comedy is just saying stuff that they think will make people made but just makes them look tired and ignorant (this also applies to Family Guy) and numerous further attempts by modern-day art to hit back at a non-existent "politically correct boogeyman" come off as similarly having nothing to say beyond "I M EDGY BROOOOOOO".

Set Sail With Ten Canoes And Its Ode To Humanizing Native Populations

One of the most exciting things about diving deeper into world cinema is getting a chance to learn about foreign events, individuals and even entire cultures I may not have been aware of. So it is with Ten Canoes that I was able to discover a part of Australia that I had no knowledge of in prior exposures to Australia in both pop culture and real life. This 2007 directorial effort hailing from Rolf De Heer and Peter Djigirr (the latter individual also plays a character in the film) aims to tell its viewers a story chronicling the various goings-on of a tribe of ancient natives residing in Arnhem Land, a Northern region of Australia, with the language of Yolŋu Matha being spoken by all the on-screen characters.

Unimportant Events Makes For Thoroughly Engaging Storytelling In The Band's Visit

Trips tend to never go as planned but for Lt. Col. Tawfiq Zacharaya (Sasson Gabai), things have been going particularly troublesome for himself and his fellow band members. They have come to Egypt to perform some music at an important local ceremony, but the scheduled ride meant to transport them to where they need to go never came. Thus, they're now trapped in a foreign land with no transportation, no shelter and very little money to speak of. Those alone are all troublesome elements but the fact that there's some turmoil going on amidst the various band members, particularly between Zacharaya and the younger and rebellious Khaled (Saleh Bakri), are only adding to the tension.

Lipstick Under My Burkha Brings Loads Of Thoughtful Empathy To Its Comedic Storytelling

Comedies can engage with themes or characters as weighty or thoughtful as any drama, so it's always a pity to see crummy comedies, either from decades past or in modern times, that refuse to combine some depth into their yuks. The likes of The Great Dictator, Superbad and The Purple Rose of Cairo are able to skillfully weave in more thoughtful ideas with a healthy supply of yuks. Now, there's nothing wrong at all with being a comedy solely interested in generating laughs (just look at the likes of gut-bustingly funny films like Hot Rod or Wet Hot American Summer), but when you're a subpar comedy that fails to even pull off the most basic joke properly, one can't help but be reminded of how thematically ambitious the best comedies can be. The likes of dismal 2017 comedies such as Fist Fight, The House and Baywatch remind one just how thoroughly lacking in either substance or jokes supposed comedies can be while Alankrita Shrivastava's new comedy Lipstick Under My Burkha, conversely, is a wonderful reminder of just how well laughs and thoughtfulness go together.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Is A Magnificent Tale Of Maintaining Individualism In The Face Of Oppression

For a good chunk of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, there is no indication where exactly lead character Otilla (Anamaria Marinca) is going or what she's trying to do. She and her roommate Gabriela Dragut (Laura Vasillu) reside in a Romanian town in the year 1987, meaning they live under a heavily-controlling government, which explains why Otilla is acting so sneaky in her day-to-day actions as she attempts to purchase cigarettes from her neighbor as well as try and meet up with a mysterious man by the name of Viarel Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). She and Dragut are supposed to meet this individual at a hotel later for important reasons that their inherently more secretive nature prevents them from talking about openly.

Wolf Warriors Comes Off Like The Chinese Equivalent To A Peter Berg Movie

Currently, the big Chinese box office juggernaut is Wolf Warriors 2, an action motion picture that just overtook Stephen Chow's The Mermaid to become the biggest movie of all-time in the country. It's nowhere near done with its massive box office run either and it looks like it'll likely crack $750 million at the Chinese box office, a massively impressive sum. You might be wondering if the box office performance of the first Wolf Warriors was big enough to serve as, with the power of retrospect, some kind of harbinger of the its successor huge success, but in fact, the first Wolf Warriors made a solid but not humongous $80.9 million that made it the 27th biggest movie of China.

I'm Starting With The Man In Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #23
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #19

When you create a piece of art, it's difficult to not have a piece of you be imprinted on the project (Though Lord knows there's plenty of instances of films or shows or other forms of art being taken away from the creators by higher-ups), like your Voldemort and the Horcrux you're putting your soul into is some kind of movie or book or what have you. With Andrei Tarkovsky, the two other movies of his that I've seen (Andrei Rublev and Stalker) have recurring filmmaking traits and storytelling elements that already seem to ooze with Tarkovsky's personal quirks and fascinations, but now here comes Mirror, a movie that serves as a deep dive into the man's psyche to a startling and fascinating degree.

What Kind Of An Impact Can One Man's Life Have? Andrei Rublev Sets Out To Answer That Very Question

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #15
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #26 (tied with Rashomon)

It's gonna be tough for me to review Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky's widely raved 1966 motion picture chronicling the life of an actual famous Russian painter. You see, I'm not familiar with Russian history in the slightest, let alone the various portions of the 15th century in that country this movie depicts. This means that, while I found much to appreciate, admire and even be outright enthralled by in watching the feature film, I did find myself feeling like I'd carry a greater appreciation for Andrei Rublev if I carried more familiarity with the time periods it depicts or even was just more accustomed to Andrei Tarkovsky's obviously individualistic style of filmmaking (this is my first time watching one of his movies).

Realism And Scripted Recreations Collide In Close-Up

Utilizing the filming style of a documentary for a fictional scripted affair is a style of filmmaking that's existed for eons now and has been popularized in the modern era by the likes of The Office and Borat. A cousin of sorts to that type of movie is the Docufiction, which merges documentary with fictional elements. The first American entry in this subgenre is apparently the 1926 motion picture Moana (yes, there was another Moana before last year's Disney musical), but one of the more acclaimed examples of this style of storytelling is an Iranian film from Abbas Kiarostami released in 1990 called Close-Up,

The Battle Of Algiers Is A Grim Look At The Enduring Nature Of A Resistance

One of the best things about watching a number of older foreign motion pictures is that many of these titles offer me the chance to explore aspects of other countries histories that I have only heard about passing or never even knew existed, Jean Renoir's The Rules Of The Game was a good example of this, a 1939 motion picture that clued me in on the societal issues of that day and age in France. The subject of this movie review, the 1966 film The Battle Of Algiers, is another strong example of this phenomenon, centering itself on an eight year long North Africa conflict that I had no idea even transpired.

In The Mood For Love Has Style To Spare, But Its Character Don't Quite Sparkle

Love makes people do crazy things, it's as simple as that. You'll buy expensive things for those you're infatuated with, you'll go eat at places you never would have gone to for the sake of going on a unique date, all that jazz. Movies, just like any other avenue of artistic storytelling, have been able to wring plenty of storytelling mileage out of depicting the lengths to which people will go to for the sake of romance, sometimes for drama, sometimes for comedy, but always as a way to tap into the universal notion of how powerful romance can be.

Akira Kurosawa Tackles The World Of Crime Thrillers With High And Low

Crime thrillers have been a notable part of the very fabric of cinema for decades upon decades upon decades, so it's no wonder that Akira Kurosawa, a director notable for the versatility in the genres his films inhabits, would eventually dip his toes into this pond of storytelling with High And Low (which, unless I'm horribly mistaken, is not the only crime thriller in his filmography). Reuniting with Toshiro Mifune, the Leonardo DiCaprio to his Martin Scorsese, this is a tale set in then modern-day Japan and revolves around a kidnapping.