I reviewed the new Claire Denis film The Fence at this year’s New York Film Festival for PopMatters:
It is unclear where Alboury, the character played by the great Isaach De Bankolé in Claire Denis’ scorching, powerfully mythic new film The Fence, works or lives. It is not even clear if he is a corporeal person or some apparition generated by history and the murmurings of the unquiet dead…
The Fence does not have a U.S. release date set.
My review of this new film from Rithy Panh ran at Slant Magazine:
In Rithy Panh’s Meeting with Pol Pot, three French journalists are invited to meet with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1978. Looking to discover the truth, they find themselves made accomplices of an elaborate public relations effort meant to hide the regime’s atrocities from the outside world. Loosely based on Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over, the film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting…
Here’s the trailer:
Woody Allen is still making movies. And judging by his latest, he hasn’t lost a step. Coup de Chance opens next week in limited release and then should be on digital pretty soon.
My review is at Slant Magazine:
Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance starts appropriately with a random encounter and finishes with an out-of-nowhere intervention. But what lies in between those moments of chance is tightly scripted and purposeful, with barely a scene or line out of place. The film is at once among Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited…
Here’s the trailer:
The new film from Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) is opening in limited release this Friday. Do what you have to do, but find it. Nothing else like it in theaters right now.
My review is at PopMatters:
As the title of Radu Jude’s new film suggests, things end not with a bang but a whimper. In the case of Romania, the country whose legacy of corruption and exploitation has been a favored topic of Jude and other Romanian New Wave filmmakers, it is presented as collapsing with an undignified slide into lethargy, misdirected rage, and social media clowning. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is an absurdist and occasionally hilarious comedy. It also leaves you with the sensation of witnessing a slow-motion catastrophe where the worst has yet to happen…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the Oscar-nominated Io Capitano ran in Slant Magazine:
Given the challenges that many migrants face when traveling to a new land, it makes sense to assume that they’re fleeing harrowingly nightmarish realities. But the scenes that director Matteo Garrone uses to open his heartrending Io Capitano are far from nightmarish. Garrone’s big-dreaming migrant characters aren’t running away from something so much as they’re running toward it. The possibility that their goal is little more than a mirage makes this epic tale’s often horrendous journey even more wrenching…
Io Capitano opens later in February. Here’s the trailer:
Francois Ozon’s absolutely smashing new movie, The Crime is Mine, opens in late December.
My review for Slant Magazine is here:
François Ozon’s fizzy comedy The Crime Is Mine, a loose adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play Mon crime, begins with murder, poverty, and a suicide threat. But the film delivers this material with such a bubbly optimism that it wouldn’t be a surprise if the cast broke into a choreographed number from Gold Diggers of 1933…
Here’s the trailer:
Delectable, delicious, all the adjectives that spring to mind with the great food films, The Taste of Things opens later this year in limited release.
My review is at Slant Magazine:
Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things is almost halfway done before it even hints that there’s something going on within its fin-de-siècle setting besides the creation and consumption of beautiful meals. The film’s first half hour is in fact just that, with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a veteran cook in the manor home of Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the epicure for whom she’s been working for over 20 years, making an extravagant, multi-course meal for him and his friends. The men eat the food, then compliment Eugénie on her cooking…
Here’s the trailer:
The new movie from Pablo Larrain (Ema, Spencer) has a decidedly different take on the horrors perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet during his reign of power in Chile.
My review is at PopMatters:
El Conde, an alternately ambitious and maddening attempt to reckon with one of the 20th century’s ugliest villains, does not take Pinochet at face value. Larraín and his frequent co-writer Guillermo Calderon do not dwell on the free market capitalist, career army officer, and power-mad dictator known by the world. Instead, they imagine Pinochet as a 250-year-old French vampire who nearly gets staked to death in the revolution. A reactionary from the jump, he wanders the world as a mercenary helping to put down revolutions in Russia and Haiti before ending up in South America under a new identity…
El Conde is on Netflix now. The trailer is here.
Albert Serra’s latest film, Pacifiction, played some festivals last year (including Cannes, where it was raved about). It is opening this week in limited release.
My review is at PopMatters:
The first images in Albert Serra’s slippery and satirical film Pacifiction are not what comes to mind for many when thinking of Tahiti. Yes, the film’s background is a limpid array of mountains drenched in a gorgeous salmon-tinted sunset. The long pan, however, reveals a more prosaic foreground: A busy port lined with stacks of shipping containers that function as a mercantile mountain range. From Serra’s perspective, Tahiti might be a paradise and should be photographed as such, but it is also a place of business…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the new Ukraine-set black comedy Donbass, which opens next week, is at The Playlist:
Winner of the 2018 Un Certain Regard award for Best Director at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival but only getting released in the United States now, “Donbass” makes for eerie viewing coming just weeks after the Russo-Ukrainian war entered a new phase following the Russian invasion of late February 2022. Set at some unspecified time after Russian-backed separatists carved off the Donbass region of southeast Ukraine in early 2014, the film provides a glimpse of what life is like in (as the on-screen titles term it) “Occupied Territory in Eastern Ukraine.” From what we see here, day-to-day life appears to be some combination of Cossack ”Mad Max” cosplay, throwback Soviet-era corruption, smashmouth nationalism, and gangster’s paradise…
Here is the trailer:
My review of Ema, opening this week in limited release, is at PopMatters:
A burning, jolting firecracker of a film, Pablo Larraín’s Ema is filled with a surplus of passion that could surprise fans of the filmmaker’s more bottled-up work like Jackie (2016) and Neruda (2016). It does, however, share those films’ hypnotic and sinuous flow of sight and sound, delivered here with a more modernistic punchy antagonism. There is also frequent deployment of a flamethrower, generally a worthy addition to just about any film…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the historical drama Dear Comrades! is at Eyes Wide Open:
If history matters — an assumption we might have once taken for granted — one reason is to ensure crucial events are not forgotten due to the march of time. In today’s climate of manufactured truths and glib whataboutism, it is hard to believe that any historical memory has the power to change minds or poke holes in some demagogue’s balloon of hot air. But in the Soviet Union portrayed in Andrei Konchalovsky’s icy yet searing historical drama Dear Comrades!, the commissars busy erasing the record of a massacre make the argument that history does matter…
You can see it at Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.
Here’s the trailer:
The latest movie from Yi’nan Diao (Black Coal, Thin Ice), The Wild Goose Lake is a spectacularly cinematic story that sets a massive manhunt for a gangster in a “lawless” part of China.
It opens this week. My review is at PopMatters:
Sometimes you just know within a few minutes. At the start of Yi’nan Diao’s rapturously beautiful and darkly entertaining The Wild Goose Lake (Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui) two lean and beautiful people with the look of the hunted in their eyes circle around each other at a train station. Cigarettes are lit in the glimmering darkness. The man, Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), has a large scar on his face and carries a bag that must contain cash…
Here is the trailer:
French director Ladj Ly’s scorching new movie, Les Misérables, is set in the same poverty-stricken outer neighborhood of Paris as Victor Hugo’s novel and involves many of the same themes of systemic oppression, but the story is Ly’s own.
Les Misérables is opening this week and will be available later on Amazon Prime. My review is at Slant Magazine:
The giddy joy and strong sense of unity that pulsates throughout the opening montage of Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables is as stirring as it is fleeting. A black kid dashes with his friends onto the Paris Metro, flying over turnstiles like a superhero as they rush to a crowded bar to watch France compete in the World Cup. They roar along as their team wins and pours out into the streets to join the crowds in front of the Arc de Triomphe. One of the boys wears a tricolor flag like a cape, joining what looks like a unifying wave of national pride. Several minutes later, Ly makes it clear that this sense of comity is little more than a bad joke…
Here’s the trailer:
In the haunting new movie from the director of Aquarius and Neighboring Sounds, a remote Brazilian village fights off mysterious invaders.
Bacurau had its U.S. premiere this week at the New York Film Festival. My review is at PopMatters.
Here’s the trailer:
Chris Barsanti 
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