Through films as varied as “The Father,” “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Relic,” dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed on screen in recent years — a subgenre that carries a trigger warning for anyone with off-screen experience of the subject. For those who think they cannot stomach one…
Sundance Film Festival 2023
A couple of times over in “When It Melts,” the directorial debut of Belgian actor Veerle Baetens, Eva, played as a morose, withdrawn adult by Charlotte De Bruyne, looks at a photograph of herself as a 13-year-old. In the picture, child-Eva (Sundance prizewinner Rosa Marchant) is grinning a lopsided, optimistic…
In the 20-plus years since “Shrek” burned up the box office, the fairytale with a postmodern twist has become such a standardized genre, one wonders whether kids might be slightly thrown by one that plays out completely in earnest. They aren’t about to be tested in that regard by “The…
The world can probably be divided into two camps of people: those who will watch “The Deepest Breath,” a heart-pumping documentary on the extreme sport of free-diving, and understand the dangerous pull of the big blue, and those for whom it might be the most nightmarish vicarious trip into the…
Sierra Urich’s grandmother, Behjat, has the tart, callused demeanor that comes from a life of tumult and loss. Married at 14 to an Iranian soldier, she grieved for older relatives who were murdered or executed, and raised a family that was scattered in the wake of the Iranian Revolution: As…
Thirty years on from its dissolution, the legacy of apartheid still weighs heavily on South African cinema, as a new, outspoken generation of Black filmmakers grapples with truths and wounds that they previously had limited scope to voice. But rage over the past fuses remarkably with assertive, forward-looking investment in…
It’s five years since Theresa May, then the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of the Brexit era, coined the term “citizen of nowhere” to denigrate residents of the country who identified themselves more globally. Those three words swiftly became a media catchphrase to encapsulate the Conservative government’s apparent hostility toward…
We’re all aware of the hokey old “the doctor is a woman!” riddle, but what if that doctor were Dr. Frankenstein? Distaff riffs on Mary Shelley’s OG horror novel do exist — schlocky 1971 Italian exploitation flick “Lady Frankenstein,” for one. But given that it’s a story of life-creation, it’s…
The success of long-format cult-exposé documentaries like HBO’s “The Vow” and Netflix’s “Wild Wild Country” has given the cult-curious an appetite for the kind of chain-link explosion rhythms that only serials can supply. We’re primed, one might even say programmed, to expect the smallest new kink on even the oddest…