Be Sure to Share (2009) A Film by Sion Sono

"An anomalous tearjerker from Sion Sono couched between some of the director’s most outré genre eruptions, Be Sure to Share channels Sono’s own grief over the loss of his father into a modest tale of filial piety renewed against the backdrop of terminal cancer. Shiro (Akira), who’s happily employed in his late twenties and on the cusp of engagement to his mild-mannered girlfriend, Yoko (Ayumi Itô), has his world rocked when his father Tetsuji (Eiji Okada) unexpectedly keels over and is rushed to the emergency room. When the diagnosis consigns Tetsuji to the hospital bed for what will likely be a permanent stay, Shiro, recognizing that his relationship with his dad extends scarcely beyond old-fashioned tough love, endeavors to deepen their connection before it’s too late. The premise is a melodramatic softball right over the middle of the plate, the kind of idea that Hollywood would hypothetically poach and transform into two hours of sad-macho life lessons handed down from an award-sniffing veteran actor to a handsome newcomer."

My second contribution to the Sion Sono retrospective at In Review Online continues here.

I Am Keiko (1997) A Film by Sion Sono

"I Am Keiko is a film caught within the dimensions of its maker’s head, composed of and consumed by the limits of that brain’s capacity for thought. This is a statement of fact, not a value judgment, and a twofold statement at that. Sion Sono may have directed I Am Keiko but Keiko herself, a 22-year-old waitress grieving from the recent loss of her father to cancer, is positioned within the film’s fictional framework as the sole author of its images and structure, with the film we’re watching ostensibly a celluloid diary transmitted to us as we’re witnessing it. Keiko plainly addresses the parameters of her film in voiceover: in exactly one hour and one minute’s time—she dictates to us as we contemplate the ticking of a statically framed clock—we will finish watching a series of recordings from her daily life, over which she will exercise total freedom with regard to the content and means of expression."

Review continues at In Review Online, which is currently holding a Sion Sono retrospective.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990) A Film by Peter Greenaway

"Peter Greenaway, something of an aesthetic chameleon over his long, varied career, goes to further moment-to-moment extremes of planimetric staging and obsessive symmetry than Kubrick ever did, exaggerating the decorative artifice as a material presence in the film. In rigorously choreographed horizontal dolly movements, and with an anamorphic lens splaying the edges of the frame, Greenaway’s camera probes the layers of Albert’s hedonistic den — something of a defective Matryoshka doll that gets increasingly unflattering (a boisterous kitchen, rancid walk-in freezers, and a noirish parking lot) the more it expands from its innermost form (the luxurious dining hall). It’s unmistakably apparent that this is an artificial space even before the source of an angelic opera voice on the soundtrack is revealed as a toddler dishwasher with a freaked-out head of white hair." Continued at In Review Online. This is a piece I wrote months ago but forgot to publish to the site.

Sabbatical (2015) A Film by Brandon Colvin

"As middle-aged philosophy professor Ben Hardin (Robert Longstreet) endures an existential nosedive, Sabbatical responds by redirecting that void on the audience through stylistic deprivation. Director Brandon Colvin shoots in a restrictive 4:3 aspect ratio and never moves his camera. Generally, his shots run parallel to a wall or some other flat surface, and his characters, rarely moving drastically, exist in geometric relationship to that surface..." Full review here.

Timbuktu (2015) A Film by Abderrahmane Sissako

"In Timbuktu’s sand-swept expanses, you’re either willfully complicit in the butchered standards of the Muslim authorities or you’re a dangerous dissident. Via a loose, ensemble-based, anecdotal narrative style, the film’s undertaking is to pinpoint scenarios in which this binary proves incompatible with living a pleasant (no sports or partying) or even functional (mandatory gloves for females, even those selling fish) life." Continued here.

The Duke of Burgundy (2015) A Film by Peter Strickland

"Pinastri, a scientific term given to a specific moth family, is the safe word for S&M lovers Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), but it’s no mistake that it also sounds like 'Be Nasty' when whispered in the women’s thick British accents. That’s a strategic aural misdirection, as The Duke of Burgundy ultimately builds a parallel universe where surfaces frequently mislead. It’s also an indication of the extent to which director Peter Strickland has meticulously thought through this vintage erotica throwback-cum-oneiric psycho-thriller, which shares with Strickland’s prior Berberian Sound Studio an enterprising sense of aesthetic singularity." Read on at the new In Review Online.

Two Days, One Night (2014) A Film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

"Bringing Sandra closer to the camera during her moments of emotional self-awareness (be it anguish or ecstasy) or letting her drift further away in bouts of dazed dissociation (such as when her depression gets so bad she seems to fall asleep inside herself) are methods that help establish something close to a one-to-one empathetic relationship between camera and subject. It’s all fitting because the Dardennes are less interested in the politics and economics of their chosen scenario than they are in surveying the full spectrum of Sandra’s social existence, a spectrum that gradually starts to form a picture not of the specific assembly-line factory where she works, but rather civilization at large and all its familiar peculiarities and inconsistencies." Continue reading here.

Maidan (2014) A Film by Sergei Loznitsa

"It would be a mistake to overstate the similarities between the events presented in Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan—a series of non-violent protests gone awry in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2013—and the ugliness this year in Ferguson, Mo., but you would have to be blind not to be struck by them...An ambitious, epoch-defining film on the still-in-many-ways-unfinished Ferguson tragedy has yet to arrive (though, given the proliferation of transmedia content during the fiasco, it wouldn’t be extreme to assume there was another Loznitsa out there in the crowd somewhere), but for Kiev, Maidan fills that role resoundingly." Full review here.

Story of My Death (2014) A Film by Albert Serra

"Most damningly for a film so clearly in pursuit of dreamlike illogic, Serra fails wholly as an image-maker. That cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer's work in Story of My Death (principal photography apparently yielded over 400 hours of semi-improvised footage) has been speciously compared to Caravaggio's canvases is an insult to Caravaggio. Allegedly framed in 4:3 but re-sized for widescreen in post-production and bearing all the compositional inelegance that such an approach would imply, the film looks to have only incorporated the bare minimum of artificial lighting, in many cases using none at all—an admirable gamble when you have a genuine wizard like Emmanuel Lubezki on your team, but a foolhardy and arbitrary aesthetic handicap in this case." Full review here.

The Homesman (2014) A Film by Tommy Lee Jones

"In its judicious use of long dissolves and its dwarfing of figures across the landscape, The Homesman starts to suggest the 2:35:1, snow-swept version of Meek’s Cutoff’s hallucinogenic cross-country sweep, treating the landscape as a directionless abyss littered with peculiar encounters...In a deadpan master shot that summarizes the tone of the journey, three mad women crouch over the earth defiling what Jones so admiringly photographed in the prologue. (Really, that’s the essence of this spurtive director’s style: a classically durable composition thrown off balance by some unnerving grotesquery.)" Full review here.

Force Majeure (2014) A Film by Ruben Östlund

"The largely frosty Force Majeure is repeatedly thawed by a sense of humor that suggests Fellini on downers—reined-in burlesque, in other words—and a philosophical interest in the role of chance, so powerful a force in life as to upset even the film’s own controlled surface (as it does in a sublimely amusing moment that fleetingly assumes the point of view of a remote-controlled flying toy at the most inopportune time). Despite the film’s overarching Scandinavian austerity—Östlund’s shots rarely move for fear of displacing the careful merging of compositional lines with the corners of the 2:35:1 frame—it’s also cinematographically in tune with its characters at pivotal moments in ways that suggest a sharp directorial sensitivity." Full piece on this Scandinavian stroke of brilliance at In Review Online.

Hellaware (2013) A Film by Michael M. Bilandic

"If the best thing to come of Hellaware is a heightened receptiveness on the part of the audience to dubious cinematic ethnography and its strident claims of “verisimilitude,” one could perhaps call that a cultural victory. Problem is, the film has none of the sympathy for the Other that this reflexive contempt towards its own local culture might suggest." Full review at In Review Online.

Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) A Film by Robert Minervini

"Like a significant portion of low-budget, serious-minded independent work taking place today, Stop the Pounding Heart falls squarely in the trend of on-location, non-actor-employing, process-oriented hybrid filmmaking. Thankfully, though, it bares no disingenuous traces of bandwagon-hopping. Himself born into an Italian working-class family, Minervini has palpable affection for his subjects and refuses to place them under an unflattering editorial light." Full article at In Review Online.

Northern Light (2014) A Film by Nick Bentgen and Lisa Kjerulff

Northern Light, Nick Bentgen's microbudget portrait of frost-bitten Americana, is a better film than my immediate reaction led me to believe. The issues I see in construction are minimized somewhat by the film's overwhelming humility. Either way, here's a review I wrote on the documentary against the clock this week for In Review Online.

Conversation on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death (2005)

It's been nearly three months since Kenji Fujishima and I published our last Passing Notes column at In Review Online—a feature in which we pick a cinematic subject (anything that strikes our fancy at a given point in time) and trade thoughts about it. Our last two happen to have been prompted by tragic losses in film culture, the March piece focusing on the Phillip Seymour Hoffman-co-starring The Master and our new discussion—all 4,293 words of it—looking at Workingman's Death, the audacious 2005 docu-essay by recently deceased Austrian globetrotter Michael Glawogger (whose Whore's Glory I mused on at this blog two years ago). I'm a strong supporter of Glawogger's work, Workingman's Death especially, and the loss of this artist is devastating. We're not only losing a vitally important voice in contemporary documentary cinema but also a genuinely curious human being whose thirst for knowledge and experience was an example to live by. The conversation can be found here.

Borgman (2013) A Film by Alex van Warmerdam

"Like some kind of nightmarish variation on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the film charts the process by which a posse of seductive but cold-blooded forest-dwellers infiltrates the rural Netherlands home of a wealthy family and proceeds to exert an ambiguous grip on them—the exact nature of that grip and its implications being the mystery of the narrative." Full review at In Review Online.

Gebo and the Shadow (2012) A Film by Manoel de Oliveira

105-year-old Portuguese filmmaker (sorry, it's tough not to cite in awe his age) Manoel de Oliveira's superb, haunting Gebo and the Shadow premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 and is only now getting a (severely limited) stateside release at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Talk about respect for your elders, eh? Anyway, I wrote about why you should go see it if you have a chance at In Review Online.

Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film (2012) A Film by Hanly Banks

If you like Bill Callahan, particularly his excellent 2011 album Apocalypse, you'll probably like Hanly Banks' new tour documentary. I discussed its merits at In Review Online.

Nymphomaniac: Volume II (2014) A Film by Lars Von Trier

Writing about Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac has had that special effect of making me like it more, which explains why my new In Review Online piece hits the site’s “Gold” designation. In addition, I've posted some tangential thoughts that didn't make their way into my formal review over at Letterboxd.

Mistaken for Strangers (2014) A Film by Tom Berninger

I'm way late on this update, but this past Friday I reviewed Mistaken for Strangers – a new documentary ostensibly about Brooklyn-based rock band The National's recent global tour but actually more about singer Matt Berninger's attention-whoring brother (well, that's a little insensitive, but seriously) – for In Review Online. Read my skeptical take here.