The Human Surge (2016) A Film by Eduardo Williams

"Were it not for one showy transition of a camera burrowing through topsoil for a macro-photographic tour of an ant colony, The Human Surge might easily be mistaken for a particularly interminable YouTube video, unfolding as it does like the aimless time-killing of bored boys without much to do and a crummy camera to record whatever ends up happening. Facetious as such a characterization may seem for a film with the temerity to divide its action across Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines, it's not exactly unsuitable given director Eduardo Williams's subject matter, which concerns the lives of minimum-wage slackers from the aforementioned locales who fill their downtime forging tenuous human connections across Internet platforms. Using a pair of nifty cuts to connect these disparate milieus, the film develops in chapters as if to imply a fundamental interconnectedness between people across the world in similar dead-end situations, yet often the only quality holding the episodes together is the amateurishness of the staging."

Full review continues at Slant Magazine.

A Guy from Fenyang (2016) A Film by Walter Salles

"In the blighted canon of documentaries about directors, A Guy from Fenyang has nothing of the hagiographical cheerleading or predetermined talking-head baton passing of something like Frank Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune. If anything, Salles seems to take a cue or two from Gabe Klinger's excellent Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, another film bonded tightly to the leisurely thought processes of its subjects, and one equally unbothered to let the work in question play out at length and stand on its own."

Full review here.

Boy and the World (2015) A Film by Alê Abreu

"In Alê Abreu's Boy and the World, the eponymous boy, a stick figure that otherwise appears to conform to the dictionary definition of a boy, is often seen moving laterally through a two-dimensional simulation of the modern world, the framing loose enough and the “camera” movement methodical enough to suggest a retro side-scroller. Like Jacques Tati's bumbling on-screen persona in films like Playtime and Mon Oncle, the boy, who materializes at the beginning of the movie in a blank white canvas that gradually gets crowded with obstacles, appears in combat with the mechanized workings of his environment throughout, dodging cargo bins dropped from cranes and leaping across architectural gaps like Super Mario in a less fanciful Mushroom Kingdom." Continued at Slant Magazine.