JOHN C. KOCH
director | d.p. | editor
Mommy
dir. Xavier Dolan
Review by A.O. Scott, New York Times
The French-Canadian writer, director and actor Xavier Dolan is only 25, but “Mommy,” his fifth feature film in five years, seems like the work of an even younger filmmaker. I mean this, mostly, as a compliment. Stories of adolescence — young adult novels, coming-of-age movies, teenage-targeted television series — are usually the work of adults, and therefore often temper their emotional immediacy with nostalgia, condescension or grown-up wisdom. But “Mommy,” the story of a troubled young man and his mother, seethes and howls with unchecked feeling. Shot in the square, narrow dimensions of a cellphone video, it is a pocket opera of grandiose self-pity, a wild and uncompromising demand for attention, a cri de coeur from the selfie generation.
From What is Before
dir. Lav Diaz
Review by Justin Chang, Variety
“These are cursed times,” a man notes toward the end of “From What Is Before,” and the full weight and meaning of those words come powerfully into focus across all five-and-a-half hours of Lav Diaz’s hauntingly beautiful new picture, which chronicles the gradual decline of a small coastal barrio in the Philippines in the final days before president Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972. At once a vital work of historical reclamation and a sort of Southeast Asian companion piece to Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” — another stark, black-and-white drama about mysterious acts of evil befalling a fragile community — this endlessly patient and contemplative work will court a smaller audience than Diaz’s Cannes-premiered international breakthrough, “Norte, the End of History,” but should exert a strong pull on viewers willing to stick it out.
Cemetery of Splendour
dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Review by Justin Chang, Variety
An incurable sleeping sickness yields an elusive yet expansive rumination on matters both political and intensely personal in “Cemetery of Splendor,” the latest gently hypnotic cinematic enigma from the Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While his tale of a hospital volunteer who bonds with an infected soldier emerges from the same mythic worlds explored in “Tropical Malady” (2004) and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010), the surreal visitations here occur at a more subdued, almost subterranean level; this is an eerily becalmed work in which spiritual possessions and mysterious deities come to seem virtually indistinguishable from ordinary reality.
No Home Movie
dir. Chantal Akerman
Review by Nicholas Rapold, New York Times
By the age of 25, the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman had made a three-hour-plus cinematic landmark with her 1975 film faithfully chronicling a housewife’s obsessive routines. But that was only the beginning. In the decades that followed, Ms. Akerman pioneered a cinema of patient observation through long takes, created essay films in ways that spawned legions of imitators, made a musical or two, undertook meditative surveys of the United State-Mexico border and the Eastern bloc, designed video installations for major galleries, and shot a film about Jewish jokes.
But her latest project — “No Home Movie,” an intimate extended visit with her mother, who died at the age of 86, in April 2014 — took her places she had not expected to go.
The Lobster
dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Review by Guy Lodge, Variety
Longevity and lifelong fertility are among the reasons why a human may wish to become the eponymous creature, explains Colin Farrell’s protagonist at the outset of “The Lobster.” The tasty crustacean’s rich associations with the Surrealist movement appear to have slipped his mind, but not that of Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose supremely singular fifth feature — his first in English — takes his ongoing fascination with artificially constructed community to its dizziest, most Buñuelian extreme to date. A wickedly funny protest against societal preference for nuclear coupledom that escalates, by its own sly logic, into a love story of profound tenderness and originality, this ingenious lo-fi fantasy will delight those who already thrilled to Lanthimos’ vision in “Alps” and the Oscar-nominated “Dogtooth,” while a starry international cast should draw as-yet-unconverted arthouse auds into his wondrously warped world.
In the Shadow of Women
dir. Philippe Garrel
Review by Sam Weisberg, Village Voice
Baby-faced yet haggard, aloof yet mopey, Pierre (Stanislas Merhar) is a token lady-killer. Slim physique, perfectly fitting denim, and pointedly unkempt blond hair aside, his sullen face and infrequent speech make the women he targets simultaneously want to take care of and deconstruct him. A struggling documentary filmmaker, Pierre's silences are equally enthralling to his subjects; when shooting normally tongue-tied WWII resistance fighters, he indirectly urges them to fill in the void.
Right Now, Wrong Then
dir. Hong Sang-soo
Review by James Lattimer, Slant
Hong Sang-soo's films are so openly similar to one another that they often seem to run together in one's mind, their worlds an agreeably homogenous accumulation of wryly interchangeable neurotic directors, pretty girls, awkward encounters, and extended drinking sessions. While Right Now, Wrong Then isn't a departure as such, it's also not exactly more of the same, functioning, if anything, as a subtle dig at those who deem the art of variation to be no such thing. A neurotic film director does indeed meet a pretty girl on a trip to a film festival, but the two impeccably calibrated permutations of their encounter that Hong serves up shift the focus somewhere else entirely, namely on to the more abstract question of character versus circumstance. Is any meeting truly unique? Does the nature of a connection really hinge on specific moments? And are we actually different people in different situations?
Mustang
dir. Deniz Gamze Erguven
Review by David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
The word "Mustang", which is also the evocative title of Turkish-French filmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven's stirring first feature, conjures vivid images of bands of wild horses roaming the untamed American West, their manes flying and their defiant spirits resistant to being broken. Those qualities also fit the five young sisters in this intimate drama, whose independence and burgeoning sexuality prompt their alarmed guardians to sequester the girls in a systematic campaign to break their unity and tame them into traditional female roles.
Ex Machina
dir. Alex Garland
Review by Manohla Dargis, New York Times
The perfect 21st-century female looks like a million bucks though costs a great deal more. In “Ex Machina,” Alex Garland’s slyly spooky futuristic shocker about old and new desires, the female in question is a robot called Ava, a name suggestive of both Adam and Eve. Ava has a serene humanoid face and the expressive hands and feet of a dancer, but also the transparent figure of a visible woman anatomy model. Beautiful and smart, sleek and stacked, Ava is at once decidedly unsettling and safely under lock and key, which makes her an ideal posthuman female.
Irrational Man
dir. Woody Allen
Review by Scott Foundas, Variety
After Alfred Hitchcock and his Gallic disciple, Claude Chabrol, has any filmmaker devoted more screen time to contemplating the mechanics of the “perfect” murder than Woody Allen? His latest, “Irrational Man,” adds to a tally that also includes “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point” and the little-seen “Cassandra’s Dream” — only, unlike those films’ homicidal protagonists, the philosophical anti-hero of Allen’s 45th feature kills not for love or money, but rather for a kind of existential clarity. That conceit puts a fresh spin on a familiar premise and marks “Irrational Man” as one of the Woodman’s more offbeat and ambitiously weird projects since the fragmented “Deconstructing Harry” in 1997, though less conventionally entertaining than recent home runs like “Blue Jasmine” and “Midnight in Paris.”
© 2019 John C. Koch
