Marcelo Caetano’s Baby might combine reliable and clichéd tropes, but Caetano’s sex work study succeeds thanks to its keen observation of queer communities.
Baby Works His Way Out of a Corner
Category: Festivals
Reviews and dispatches exploring the best new cinema premiering around the world.
Sean Baker Does It Again with Anora
Sean Baker continues his deeply humanist exploration of sex workers’ complex inner lives with the touching and charming Russian-American fairytale Anora.
Oh No, Canada
Paul Schrader’s latest Oh Canada is a self-reflexive work that fails to combine its various threads into a satisfying treatise on life’s regrets.
The Substance Has Never Met a Real Woman
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance boasts impressive technical sound design and monster work but suffers from a lack of compelling female characters.
What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move. Prodding the Parthenon.
With alacrity and charm, Daphné Hérétakis’ short What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move takes aim at one of Greece’s most enduring national symbols.
The Other Way Around Is Repetitive. Meaningful. Beautiful. Repetitive.
There is beauty and meaning littered throughout the repetitive actions of Jonás Trueba’s endlessly playful Directors’ Fortnight romcom The Other Way Around.
Block Pass. A Tyred Vintage.
Antoine Chevrollier’s Block Pass captures its working-class milieu well but suffers due to its tired secondhand framing of queer suffering.
Sauna Day. Intimate Masculinity on Display.
Sauna Day, Anna Hints follow-up to Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, trades female intimacy for male suppression, to eroticised and compelling results.
The Story of Souleymane. Cycling Through Limbo.
The Story of Souleymane is a tightly-focussed, Dardenne-esque tale of an immigrant delivery driver trying to make ends meet that brims with heartfelt emotions.
The Empty Pageantry of Savanna and the Mountain
A group of villagers stage a series of increasingly bizarre protests against the development of a lithium mine in the unengaging Savanna and the Mountain.