Screen Anarchy

In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: two music videos by Alma Har’el. Alma Har’el has been on the cusp of truly breaking through to the mainstream, and has been for a very long time. Ever since starting her film career with a handful of music videos and commercials, before making two lauded documentary-fiction hybrids, she has pursued a singular style and vision. The works of Alma Har’el are most notable for their seamless blend between fact and fiction, between documentary filmmaking and a more dreamlike process. The style of her work often blurs staged stilted scenes full of exaggerated colorful costumes and exaggerated often dance-like performances, with a more naturalistic shooting style:…

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I am happy that these kinds of gritty, but emotionally tragic crime films are still being made. Hiroshi Shôji’s Tatsumi is one of those skuzzy neighborhood dramas, the kind soaked in poverty, spit, blood, and tears. Where the crime feels more senseless and desperate than ever, and yet, an unlikely set of genuine relationships evolve out of the mess. The violence is not so much the point, nor is it gratuitous, but rather it is the syntax to make the audience the feel the astringent carnage inherently in it. And, here, to contrast it with a burgeoning platonic love between the two central characters, the eponymous Tatsumi, and teenage mechanic tomboy Aoi.    Tatsumi has boat, and some small claim to a patch water for…

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The Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes merges genres, time periods, and cinematic techniques to create a post-modern exploration of cinema’s fluid nature, offering a sophisticated and reflective homage to the art form that challenges conventional narrative boundaries.

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A young woman lost in a series of meaningless connections falls in love with a charismatic and sensitive man, who hides a dark secret that turns her affair into a dangerous obsession.

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In the future Saul hitches a ride with Anna and Vadim, a young couple on their way off planet for a vacation. Saul requests that they simply drop him off at the nearest uninhabited planet. He says he’s done with human nature, and people. When they touch down they discover a handful of bodies outside their ship, frozen to death. This planet is inhabited and a large number of the humanoids here are being held against their will.    Daniel Shapiro and Alex Topaller’s sci-fi short film, Escape Attempt, is based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Yep, the Russian authors who wrote the screenplay for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, based on their novel Roadside Picnic.    Their…

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Fantastic genres like science fiction, fantasy and horror lend themselves for hiding a message in your entertainment. Throw in monsters, aliens or revolting transformations and you can make the most difficult ethical dilemmas palatable for a larger audience. But some films do away with the ‘hiding’ part and go straight for the dilemma. One of those is French director Jérémy Clapin’s new film Meanwhile on Earth (released in its home country as Pendant ce Temps sur Terre). In it, we follow Elsa (Megan Northam, admirably carrying the entire film), a young nurse working in a hospital for elderly with dementia. Years earlier, her brother Franck was an astronaut who disappeared during a space mission, and the whole family is still coping, badly, with loss and…

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Editor Tony Zhou and Illustrator Taylor Ramos are perhaps best known for their YouTube channel Every Frame A Painting, their video essay side-hustle away from their day jobs in the TV animation industry.   Early pioneers in this space nearly a decade ago, there now many (many) channels dedicated to explaining individual films, or the process of filmmaking (or both) at length in this format; it is a sizeable niche. During the pandemic, Netflix and David Fincher gave them a limited run series, Voir, where they were the show runners, further carrying the Video Essay torch into the mainstream. (Personal aside: the Walter Chaw episode on Walter Hill’s 48 hours is the gem of that series.)   With their new film The Second, a narrative…

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At the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival back in 2021, several films directly tackled the subject of environmental issues (including the International Critics’ Jury Winner that year). This year, the selection skewed more towards emotions of grief, loss, failed relationships. One film at the festival this year could effortlessly have been in both selections though: Ulaa Salim’s science fiction drama For Evigt a.k.a. Eternal. At the beginning of Eternal, an earthquake in Iceland opens a huge fissure in the ocean’s floor, raising the water temperature, destabilizing the tectonic plates, altering the electromagnetic field surrounding Earth and allowing lethal space radiation to reach the surface. In short: the end of the world is suddenly visible, and mere decades away. Part of the planet’s population starts partying…

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Jay Song’s two-hour long, complete implosion of the social contract, 4PM, is delightfully frustrating, and terribly absurd. Loosely based on the Belgian novel, “The Stranger Next Door,” written by Francophone author Amélie Nothomb, the film plays as if that scene from ‘The Burbs — the one where a meet-the-neighbours visit sees all parties sit in awkward, tense silence until Tom Hanks chokes on a sardine topped pretzel — was stretched out to feature film length. A film of fruitless small talk, due to the desire to be polite turns into a comic-existential horror film, the pace is often restrained, but the camera work is utterly manic.

   Jeong-In, a philosophy professor who about to embark on a one year sabbatical, decides to buy a home…

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Guy Maddin teams up with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson on a trippy political comedy in a dystopian predicament led by Cate Blanchett.

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