Eye of the Norm: Simpson Looks at Coastal Coasting with Minimalist, Passive POV
There is a new breed of emerging American indie filmmakers who are Sunshine State-centric, highlighting the unique diversity of its communities and the complexities of its geography. In her feature debut, Euro-American filmmaker Alexandra Simpson captures this essence with an observational style — it’s a little reminiscent of Tim Sutton’s early work. In contrast to typical disaster films (even of the micro-budgeted indie sort), Simpson’s No Sleep Till presents a quiet, sometimes docu cinema where there’s no looming catastrophe or fear porn-driven narrative. Instead, the film portrays a storm as it truly feels—an inevitable part of life—where characters, often with no interconnected stories, simply exist in the moment, embracing the fluidity of time.… 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.