The Safety of Objectivism: Corbet Unleashes the Survival Instinct of Rational Egoism
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see,” so says the heroic protagonist of Ayn Rand’s sensational 1943 novel The Fountainhead, an individualist archetype she intended as “the man that man should be…above all—the man who lives for himself.” It was a tome in which Rand began to craft her controversial theory of Objectivism, which, among its tenets, suggests morality is wholly independent of human knowledge. Filmmaker Brady Corbet, with his third feature, the masterful saga The Brutalist, finds himself, along with co-writer and partner Mona Fastvold, freely inspired by Rand’s iconic novel (and no, their achievement is certainly not akin to the output of ‘second-rater’ mentality skewered by Rand, those collective gatekeepers who squash genius in their contradictory crusade to uphold the greater good).… Read the rest
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.… 
Nothing is what it appears to be in Argentinean Luis Ortega’s latest film Kill the Jockey, a crime comedy drama which becomes an increasingly complex exercise regarding identity. The film itself suffers from the same semblance of identity crisis as some of its characters, which is akin to Ortega’s last film, El Angel (2018), about a cherub-faced criminal whose misdeeds initially seem all the more shocking because of his demeanor. 
