Sheep, Sheep, Sheep: Tsangari’s Monotonous Treatise on Modernization
Adapted from a novel by Jim Croce, Harvest is Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s third feature narrative, and, unfortunately, also her least effective. Described as the director’s take on the Western genre which aims to depict “the trauma of modernity,” it instead plays like a glacially paced bit of folk horror as concerns an unnamed time and place where an obscure farming community has been deemed an obsolete outpost to its money hungry landowners. While an aggressive edit of about thirty minutes from its two-hour plus run time might make its endlessly repetitive interactions feel a bit less languorous, a lack of tension and characterization robs this moral fable from conjuring any real emotional impact.… Read the rest
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her seminal essay 
The tagline for Battlefield, the latest from Italian auteur Gianni Amelio, could very well read “You gotta be cruel to be kind,” seeing as it turns on complex ethical dilemmas between two diametrically opposed physicians working side by side in a military hospital in the twilight of WWI. Loosely based on the 2018 novel The Challenge by Carlo Patriarca, it’s a narrative which features Amelio’s significant interests in humans whose experiences are incredibly hobbled either by social expectations or reality, where vestiges of authentic humanity are relegated to the outskirts of society.… 
French directing twins Ludovic & Zoran Boukherma swing hard with their fourth feature, And Their Children After Them, a coming-of-age saga taking place across eight years of the 1990s in the deindustrialized (fictional) town of Heillange in Eastern France. There’s a definite richness to the narrative, a change of pace for the directing duo, who, only in their mid 30s have explored several genres, most notably with their 2020 rural werewolf drama Teddy, starring Anthony Bajon. The dense storytelling this time around is no surprise, based on French crime writer Nicolas Mathieu’s celebrated 2018 novel.… 
