Ioncinema

Through a Glass Darkly: Keltek Finds Divinity Through Insanity

Sanism might be the term best used to define the trials and travails faced by the protagonist of Turkish director Gürcan Keltek‘s sophomore film New Dawn Fades (Yeni șafak solarken). Like the Joy Division song it shares a title with, a mentally unstable young man drifts in and out of hallucination in a film which also feels “Directionless, so plain to see.” Since the narrative is from the perspective of its spiraling principal, it takes a while to mull over Keltek’s languorous pacing to decipher if it’s merely an affliction or if something more sinister and supernatural is indeed afoot.… Read the rest

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The Taste of a Poison Paradise: Bliuvaite Explores the Commodification of Women’s Bodies

Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė perhaps could not have contrived a more succinct title than Toxic (Akiplėša) for her debut feature, set in the bleak confines of an industrial town where dysfunction and desolation is the day-to-day norm. Not all is despairing, despite what it sounds like on paper, as two thirteen-year-old girls, each outcasts for their own unique reasons, forge a fast friendship, initially as a means for subconscious survival. While the template of the narrative is quite familiar, Bliuvaitė makes some distinctive choices elevating this beyond both miserabilism or sentimental absolution, meandering like its subjects toward some ill-formed ideas about how to escape an environment they did not choose and will certainly not uplift them.… Read the rest

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The Unhappy Hooker: Vernier Explores Ennui in Monaco

Interconnected drifters aligned with sex work once again provide the backbone for Virgil Vernier’s third feature 100,000,000,000,000 (aka Cent mille milliards), a reference to the futile amount of money required to buy freedom…or happiness. A handsome young escort in Monaco has a life-changing connection during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the desolate period for the transients and wanderers who find themselves isolated. An interesting idea inadequately executed transforms a seventy-minute running time into a tormenting exercise of patience, a meandering and desultory effort which feels as unmoored from reflecting human experiences as its characters do from their purported apathy.… Read the rest

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The Dead Don’t Die: Slim Sets Adrift in Tedious Metaphors

For his third feature film, Agora, Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim continues in the realm of allegory, this time infusing elements which suggest arthouse genre. However, the initial enigmatic intrigue about a small town haunted by the past, serving as a microcosm for the world today, quickly loses steam through repetitive gestures which scuttles the pacing through purposeful (and ultimately, lethargic) ambiguity. While the impetus driving the narrative often feels ripe with promise, a trenchant superficiality also minimizes its possibilities rather than broadening it.

Two dead animals share a correspondence as they wither away in a field, predicting something dark and dangerous is on the horizon.… Read the rest

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The 2024 Fiction Feature Film selections are in and we have twenty-nine film titles as part of the first wave of eligible Euro items. the second wave will be announced in September. We of course have several 2024 Berlinale film items and a heavy load of Cannes Film Festival items from all sections with heavyweights in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. The ceremony will take place on December 7th in Lucerne, Switzerland. Categories include: European Film, European Director, European Actor, European Actress and European Screenwriter, European Documentary as well as European Discovery and the Young Audience Award (which will be made public on 5 November).… Read the rest

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Bitter Moon: Ayub Concocts a Taut Domestic Thriller

“It takes time for a bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage,” wrote Ayaan Hirsi Ali, famed author of The Caged Virgin, former politician, and critic of Islam who fled an arranged marriage as a young woman. Caged women, both mentally and physically, are the subject of Iraqi-born Austrian filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub’s sophomore narrative feature, Moon, which expertly exemplifies this frustrating struggle to flee an enclosure even when opportunities present themselves to do so. Although the narrative’s final moments suggest there’s no real satisfactory ending, even on an individual level, at least one of Ayub’s protagonists pivots to the possibility of self actualization.… Read the rest

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Make the Best of Us: Bing’s ‘Youth’ Cycle Expands Into the Gloom

The middle part of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times) perhaps more properly addresses the bleak realities of his observational endeavor, cobbled together into a cohesive structure from footage shot between 2014 and 2019. Following the Cannes premiered 2023 film Youth (Spring) (read review), which felt a rather cynical moniker for subjects tethered to Sisyphean work routines in their prime, his second installment, which appears to be more systematically edited into a time frame from 2015, suggests a more blatant, world weary scope. At a running time of nearly four hours, its immersive, repetitive structure, while inherently Bing’s signature, feels more punishing if only because there’s no real room for levity in its lengthy, often grueling discourse of late teens and twenty-somethings struggling to make ends meet in thankless textile shops.… Read the rest

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The Wind Carries On: Mateus Crafts Political Fable Fusing Past & Present

In her debut film, Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind), which finds a harvesting community lost in the past as they face an uncertain future, Portuguese director Marta Mateus descends into an abstract fable where shared memories, prayers, and pleas coalesce. Produced by Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, whose influence on Mateus’ presentation feels apparent, it’s an arthouse fable about the metaphorical plights of the working class, where even the beasts of burden have revolted, pinning them between a rock and a hard place. A long night spent in the trees ends with a morning bringing with it struggles of the past, marrying a past with the unstable present.… Read the rest

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Filmmaker Brady Corbet will have to schlep twenty-six reels from Venice Italy to Toronto’s Pearson Airport as The Brutalist is confirmed as part of the last title entries that are part of the 2024 edition of the Toronto Intl. Film Festival. Among Venice carry-overs we find another highly anticipated acquisition title in Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer and Maura Delpero‘s Vermiglio while Pedro Almodóvar completes the quartet of Venice competition items hitting up TIFF with North American Premiere debuts. Also part of the line-up we find Saturday Night bypassing much rumored Telluride premiere and it joins On Swift Horses, The Salt Path, Shell, and The Luckiest Man in America as part of heavily anticipated world premiere titles among.… Read the rest

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The Big Empty: Fgaier Crash Lands with Sentimental Drivel

For her directorial debut Weightless (Sulla terra leggeri), film editor Sara Fgaier opens her narrative with a passage from Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life, a 2013 memoir exploring grief, which ends with the line, “when we soar, we can also crash.” Although aviation is also a tangential detail to her narrative, there’s never a moment when anything really soars in what ends up being a sappy exploration of reclaiming memories of passionate love between characters who couldn’t be less interesting if they tried. The passage, much like the film’s title, ironically ends up being ripe for substantial punning, considering its a formidably inconsequential offering as either an emotional or amorous human experience.… Read the rest

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