Smite Material: Marais Unearths Jungle Cliches
It’s been over a decade since South African director Pia Marais’ last feature, and she’s spent six years working on her latest, the ambitious but ultimately lackluster Transamazonia. There’s gleaming evidence of something brilliant hinted at within substantial themes concerning religious zealotry, deforestation and familial bonds as major contributions to an eroding, toxic force which coalesce, despite good and bad intentions, into a lethal equation for all parties. But strangely oblique character development and a myriad of narrative cliches undermine the possibilities of reaching beyond the obvious, leading to a sanitized, even romanticized version of what feels like rosy-tinted post-colonialist semantics.… Read the rest
Seeing as director 
Amidst all the existential dread in Franz Kafka’s body of work, silver linings abound, perhaps no more succinctly than in an oft quoted phrase from his diaries, “The relief of giving intro destruction.” In their third feature, the Swiss filmmaking duo Ramon and Silvan Zürcher complete their metaphorical animal themed trilogy with a scream of significant anguish (and relief) with The Sparrow in the Chimney (Der Spatz im Kamin), a culmination of the interconnected miseries and joys wrought through microcosmic communal situations explored previously in 2013’s The Strange Little Cat (
Death, it seems, does not quite become Christoph Hochhäusler, the Berlin School alum making his French language debut with the enigmatically titled La Mort viendra (Death Will Come). His foray into French language, a country which first lavished considerable acclaim upon the wave of Berlin School directors who cropped up in the late 1990s German cinema scene (such as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec), feels like something of a logical full circle moment for Hochhäusler in particular, who spent years trying to make an Isabelle Huppert headlined WWII drama I’ve Seen You Smile.… 
