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.
I reviewed Father Mother Sister Brother‘s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival for PopMatters:
If there is a lesson Jim Jarmusch is trying to impart in his latest feature, Father Mother Sister Brother (and dear Lord, let’s hope he is not), it is this: Nobody knows anybody. Even when you are related. Maybe especially when you are related…
Father Mother Sister Brother should be opening in December. Here’s the trailer:
The new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) just had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
I reviewed the film for The Playlist:
Everyone has their own George Orwell and tends to think everyone else gets him wrong. As such, making a sprawling quasi-biographical documentary like “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a brave effort bound to exasperate people across the political spectrum. Even so, Raoul Peck’s repeated usage of the author’s words to buttress his own hazily presented view of current events makes this a less rigorous and engaging work than anything about Orwell should be…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley was published at Slant Magazine:
…relates Jeff Buckley’s meteoric rise and early death in the 1990s through the adoring and wounded voices of his family, friends, and bandmates. Berg leavens their wistful memories with personal and concert footage, along with Buckley’s notebook jottings, ramblingly funny and emotional voicemails, and jagged animations that are meant to simulate his manic and at times self-destructive mindset…
Here’s the trailer:
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:
My review of the new film Gazer is at Slant Magazine:
Located somewhere near the intersection of The Conversation and Memento, Sloan’s feature-length directorial debut marries the former’s obsession with watching to the latter’s meditations on the nature of perception. Like both films, it jolts the wandering, obsessive nature of its main characters with an interruption of violence and sews confusion throughout…
The trailer is here:
This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:
There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…
I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:
Now that it’s been 10 years since the first Eyes Wide Open annual movie guide came out, it seemed a good time to look back on what were the most memorable movies of 2014.
My article on Richard Linklater’s achingly poignant Boyhood was published at Eyes Wide Open:
… wobbly at times but still magical in an everyday way. The film follows a quiet and daydream-prone boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane, likable if sometimes stiff), growing up in Texas with a snarky older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and divorced parents (Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke). There’s no story, per se, it’s just his life from about age 7 to 18. Linklater’s visual scheme is straightforward and shorn of obvious flair; the often affectless dialogue even more so. But that deceptively simple framework is rich with accrued detail and insight…
More pieces on the best of 2014 to follow.
Here’s the trailer:
My review of Mati Diop’s new documentary Dahomey ran at PopMatters:
Looking back at the 19th century, when European powers rampaged across Africa and cut apart kingdoms to plunder resources and kidnap millions for the slave trade, it would be understandable to argue that stolen artifacts were not top of mind for those being colonized. To its credit, Mati Diop’s lovely yet fractious documentary Dahomey does not try to make that argument. What she does attempt is a deeper story about the loss that lingers from colonial conquest and the uncertainty about how to move forward…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the documentary Look Into My Eyes ran at PopMatters:
It shouldn’t be a shock that many of the New York psychics profiled by Lana Wilson in her fascinating and, at times, maddening documentary Look Into My Eyes are actors, writers, or artists. At the very least, they are fascinated by invented worlds. Mediums and other people who have claimed to communicate with the spirits of the dead have historically relied on a bit of theater. Thus, the seances are conducted with heavy drapes, dark shadows, and guttering candles rather than in a fluorescent-lit WeWork space…
Here’s the trailer:
I took a look back at the little-seen 1971 documentary Punishment Park in Eyes Wide Open:
In this faux documentary — imagined as the footage of a British news crew — the U.S. has created a network of internment centers called Punishment Parks to deal with prison overcrowding and help train law enforcement…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics (which just screened at both Venice and Telluride film festivals), was published in The Playlist:
It might be challenging for some viewers to take activists seriously when they are speaking in tongues. But that is exactly what Petra Costa does in her edgy yet empathetic documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics.’ Overlapping somewhat with the events chronicled in 2019’s ‘The Edge of Democracy,’ her epic account of Brazil’s recent whipsawing political battles, this film takes a step back from the action to investigate how the nation’s governance devolved into a near-permanent state of crisis. A crucial and underappreciated factor, according to Costa, is the rocketing surge of a politicized strain of evangelism that aims to accelerate rather than alleviate chaos…
The new comedy Between the Temples opens later this week in limited release. Find it if you can.
My review is at PopMatters:
There is an honesty to Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples which belies the stylistic flourishes and alt-comedy sensibility. Moment after moment provides grist for some great epiphany or cute punchline that never quite comes. That is not to say it”s a comedy without laughs; “Can we have a shotgun bat mitzvah?” feels like a contender for one of the year’s best snort-funny lines. No film where a rabbi (TV Funhouse and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel) putts golf balls into a shofar can be accused of taking itself too seriously…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger ran in Slant:
Given the sense of wonder and promotion of emotion over reason that courses through Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work, it’s appropriate that David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger starts with a recollection of a defining childhood moment. The film’s narrator and one of its executive producers, Martin Scorsese describes himself as an asthmatic child confined indoors and thunderstruck by these old films he was seeing on television. Giddy with the memory of being a young boy accidentally coming across fantastical mindblowers like The Thief of Baghdad, Scorsese says there was simply “no better initiation” into what he calls “the mysteries of Michael Powell”…
Here’s the trailer:
Ethan Hawke’s biopic of Flannery O’Connor, Wildcat, is opening soon in limited release.
My review is at Slant Magazine:
The O’Connor of Wildcat is a contentious outsider who seems ill at ease in her own skin. Too country Southern and gawky for New York, and too Catholic and idiosyncratic for the hidebound, keeping-up-appearances Protestantism of her native Georgia, she seems only somewhat at peace when putting stories on the page. As played by Maya Hawke, O’Connor is perpetually agitated, her thousand-yard stare reflecting the fervid visions and theological wranglings that bang around in her mind, suggesting more a rebellious mystic than an artist…
Trailer:
Chris Barsanti 
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