Everybody Hurts: All Pain and No Gain in Christopher Andrews’ Debut Bring Them Down
If misery loves company, then Bring Them Down is a party. The feature debut by Christopher Andrews is set in a dour and desolate vision of rural Ireland, and feels like the cinematic equivalent of walking through a foggy bog with mud up to your knees. Yet for all the atmosphere, captured by the sturdy cinematography of Nick Cooke, there’s very little of dramatic note to make this trek through the sins of fathers and sons worthwhile.
After a dramatic, backstory-establishing car crash opens the picture, the film settles into a loose Rashomon-like structure that pivots around the events that follow.… Read the rest
“Motherhood is fucking brutal,” Amy Adams’ unnamed Mother seethes in Nightbitch. 
You can’t help but wonder if Mike Leigh is making a sly joke by naming Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s ferociously angry, deeply bitter, anxiety-ridden, and devastatingly depressed character Pansy Deacon. A priestly flower, she isn’t. But Hard Truths, a late career stunner from Leigh, plants Pansy and her impenetrable exterior in tough, rich soil, and patiently brings her into miraculous bloom.
“Time heals all old pain, while it creates new ones,” states a Hebrew proverb, implying the distance from grief may court closure while carving out its own rippling chasm of hurt in the inevitable process. The constricting power of grief is at the center of Hoard, the peculiar debut from director 
“Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye.” Samuel Beckett’s passage from Happy Days crystallizes the convoluted intrigue behind Singaporean director Siew Hay Yeo’s sophomore feature Stranger Eyes. Following his 2018 Golden Leopard winning debut A Land Imagined, Yeo once again explores similar themes on the overwhelming presence of absence, and again, a complex investigation of something labyrinthine ensues. A missing child is the jumping off point for the exploration of our innate responses to being observed, or, rather, feeling seen while under a state of constant surveillance, both by our loved ones and those behind eyes in the sky we will never see.… 
