La Cocina uses its kitchen-setting as a springboard for a grand Statement on America. But it ruins the main dish by adding too many flavours.
Too Many Cooks Spoil La Cocina
Tag: Film
Love to Love Me Baby
Sam & Andy Zuchero’s unconventional love story, Love Me, is buoyed by two excellent performances from Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun.
The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire Rejects Conventionality in Favour of Archival Speculation
Madelaine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire mounts a corrective to the surrealist’s occluded legacy through a personal essayistic structure.
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust Won’t Be a Hit. It’s Too Unique For That.
Using an Unreal Game Engine to bold and unsettling effect, Ishan Shukla’s Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust is a truly unique and strange sci-fi vision.
Small Hours of the Night Gives Testimony to Disembodied Dissidence
Daniel Hui’s chamber piece makes the most of its limited location to provide fascinating ruminations on the reverberations of Singaporean history.
Days of Happiness Plays the Notes, Not the Music
Days of Happiness may offer the antidote to Tár’s toxicity, but it lacks the passion needed to make for a masterful conductor character study.
For Night Will Come. The Vampire Genre (Partially) Undone.
The perils of being a vampire in a regular-old world are subtly investigated in For Night Will Come — beating away clichés before eventually succumbing to them.
The Freewheeling Spirit of Bolaño Is Excellently Channelled in Foremost By Night
A free-wheeling, three-part riot of formal invention, Víctor Iriarte’s excellent debut is at once aesthetically rigorous and politically pointed.
Sidonie In Japan. Translation, Adrift
Sidonie In Japan is a classic example of a fine actress phoning it in, wasting Huppert’s talents in a generic, unconvincing cross-cultural examination of grief.
Stolen Just Keeps Getting Better
Indian movie Stolen levels up scene after scene, moving from a tense, whodunnit to a full-blown, white-knuckle thriller — live from Venice Film Festival.