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Direction: Nana Ekvtimishvili, Simon Groß
Country: Georgia
Hailing from Georgia, this powerful drama film denotes wonderful acting and a compelling direction from Nana Ekvtimishvili, who wrote it, and Simon Groß. Thoroughly engaging from start to finish, this is a fluid and confident effort centered on family and intricate relationships. It surpasses in a large scale the pair’s debut feature, In Bloom (2013). It tugs the heartstrings as the realistic life crisis unfolds.
Direction: Hun Jang
Country: South Korea
A Taxi Driver depicts a black page in South Korean’s history, being often melodramatic to become entirely satisfying. The historical facts are lightened up by a charismatic central character enjoyably played by Song Kang-ho (Parasite; Snowpiercer). Despite overlong and emotionally elaborate, Hun Jang’s drama film has its moments and ensures amusement.
Direction: Kitty Green
Country: USA
Kitty Green’s rigorously observant The Assistant depicts a long, exhausting work day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), a fresh college graduate and producer-wannabe working as a junior assistant for a wealthy film production company in New York.
Perspicacious, she soon figures out the sordid schemes that occur in a male-dominated office; she identifies the predators and the preys, the indifferent and the ambitious, as well as the frequent sarcasm and passivity in the face of the abusive behavior of a leader, whose face we never see. We have the sense that he hides in the shadows, yet still spreading gloominess around.
Despite strong and able, Julia is about to break down with embarrassment and disappointment, and the taciturn drama poignantly expresses the miserable work environment that many people experience but haven’t the courage to denounce.
Directed by: Olivier Assayas
Country: France, other
A misstep from acclaimed French director Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper; Clouds of Sils Maria), Wasp Network tangles itself in a plot transferred to the screen with the shopworn conventions associated with the American cinema. The espionage tale, toggling between Cuba and the US, is based on a true story, but the capable cast led by Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez was powerless to make it shine.
Direction: Ramón Salazar
Country: Spain
Exhibiting a severe, intriguing mood, this film could have been much more effective if the director, Ramón Salazar, didn’t have stretched a few scenes into the limit while packing them with a lugubrious gloominess. Somewhat painful to watch in all its human suffering and ultimately redemption.
Director: Jeff Orlowski
Country: USA
A comprehensive and eye-opening documentary by Jeff Orlowski about the dependency, isolation and other serious problems caused by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to their users. What has started with good intentions ended up in greediness, personal data manipulation, adverse political influence, and negligence. The ones who warn us are true connoisseurs of the business, people who have worked in these companies but became conscience-stricken with the direction things went. Watch the film to be both elucidated and petrified about the controversies surrounding the topic.
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Country: USA
With this new film, Charlie Kaufman (Synechdoche, New York; Anomalisa) confirms his tendency for knotty, moody, suspenseful writing/storytelling crammed with references to past lives, time discontinuities, memory tricks and baffling developments. I found some scenes utterly repetitive and ultimately inconsequent. The final segment of the film touches the ridiculous and, at times, it’s inevitable not to think: ‘I’m thinking of terminating this movie session’. But I give you one good reason to watch it: David Thewlis.
Director: Youssef Chahine
Country: Egypt
Egyptian director Youssef Chahine makes his most personal statement with An Egyptian Story, which, not having the magnetism of Cairo Station (1958), encapsulates some metaphoric scenes that implies both self-analysis and self-acceptance. Chahine trusts the leading role to Nour El-Sherif, taking us from one delicious take to another with legitimacy.
Director: Julie Cohen, Betsy West
Country: USA
A so-so documentary about a key figure in the fight for gender equality and women’s right. It’s sort of bland the way co-directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West conduct this presentation, but if you want to know a bit more about Justice Ruth Baden Ginsbourg, maybe this is a good place to start.
Director: Maimouna Doucouré
Country: France
Most of the polemic involving Cuties, the debut feature of Maimouna Doucouré, is unjustified. It’s just painful to watch. I don’t see a bad intention from the writer/director here, rather seeing the story as an eye-opener for the perils to which susceptible youth is exposed through social media. The pursuit of fame at all cost, cultural differences, estrangement, and insertion in a new community are addressed. Yet, the film gradually loses strength and focus as it moves forward.
Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s avant-garde/experimental horror reflection is also infused with scary moments and emotional turmoil. The plot, adapted from a short story by Yasunari Kawabata, follows a remorseful man who accepts a janitor job in a remote asylum located in rural Japan in hopes of freeing his incarcerated wife. Simply feverish.
A tenacious country samurai pursues a married woman, who is forced to take extreme measures to deal with his insolence. Obsessive mad love in a Japanese samurai classic that, despite not crammed with sword battles, possesses a continuous, intense dramatic flair.
Direction: Flavio Alves
Country: USA
Having the Bronx, New York, as a backdrop, The Garden Left Behind depicts the dreams, struggles and relationships of a young Mexican transgender woman. This feature debut from the New York-based Brazilian filmmaker Flavio Alves also marks the first appearance on screen by Carlie Guevara. Co-written by Alves and John Rotondo, the drama film has the particularity of having trans actors in all trans roles, using the same methodology for the Spanish-language characters. Even more peculiar is the fact that it became the first independent feature to be significantly funded through donations and sales via eBay.
Tina (Guevara), formerly called Antonio, drives an Uber to make a living. She has been in the US since the age of five but remains illegal, a predicament that makes her process of transitioning harder. Ever since, she's been living with her sympathetic grandmother, Emilia (Miriam Cruz), the only family she has left.
The occasional quarrels between them are never a threat to the strong bond, yet Tina has been going through a lot lately. She’s under the attentive psychological evaluation of Dr. Cleary (veteran actor Edward Asner), whose countless questions upset her; she joins an activist group of trans women against the recurrent discrimination, being consequently dumped by her boyfriend, Jason (Alex Kruz); and keeps struggling to find a job that feels like a good fit for an illegal alien. What she doesn’t suspect is that the quiet clerk of her neighborhood corner store, Chris (Anthony Abdo), has a secret crush on her.
With a compelling narrative and a surprising, heartbreaking finale, The Garden Left Behind satisfies as a whole. Yet, it couldn’t hide a couple of less effective scenes - like when grandma thinks she broke the vacuum cleaner - or when Guevara’s performance becomes subtly vacillating. Nevertheless, the heart of the film is in the right place, and the story serves both as a reflection about common immigration-related concerns as well as an alert for the intolerance and hatred that continuously leads to violence in America.
Direction: Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Country: Belgium / France
In the last decade, the Dardenne Brothers offered us an impressive sequence of pragmatic and intelligent gems such as The Kid with a Bike (2011) and Two Days, One Night (2014). However, they failed to maintain those levels of excellence in the last five years. If The Unknown Girl (2016), even forgettable, was still able to create some mystery, the most recent Young Ahmed is a disastrous, utterly conventional tale of fanaticism focused on a brainwashed Belgian teenager who, under the psychological control of an authoritative Imam (Othmane Moumen), decides to take extreme actions in the name of the Islam.
The obstinate Ahmed (newcomer Idir Ben Addi) marks his apostate teacher Ines Touzani (Myriem Akheddiou) as a target, but his plan to take her life away falls short. His single mother (Claire Bodson) almost gets relieved when he’s sent to a youth rehabilitation facility. From there, he’s taken to work on a farm, where he’s supposed to ease his spirit and change the radical posture. However, the experience becomes bittersweet since he immediately gets the attention of Louise (Victoria Bluck), a like-aged white girl who’s not afraid to demonstrate romantic interest in him. She stole his first kiss, but is Ahmed capable of redemption?
In some situations, the film is meticulously descriptive in the details, a factor that further limits the already rudimentary plot, and on the other hand, the scenes feel fabricated. All this makes it unpersuasive as a drama. Ahmed’s meek eyes and tractable pose bring his monstrous intentions to phoniness. Never haunting or hypnotic, the film basically relies on self-obsession to succeed, and any interest in Ahmed as a character may evaporate in no time. The conclusion is more ludicrous than shocking.
Direction: Pedro Costa
Country: Portugal
Under Pedro Costa’s tonally murky direction, Vitalina Varela fictionalizes a real slice of life in a tale marked by bitterness, abandonment, betrayal, and resentment. Over the course of two hours, there’s an infinite sadness and a despairing melancholia spreading at a slow pace, forcing us to look attentively at the feelings of the real-life title character, a 55-year-old woman who travels from her hometown, Cape Verde, to an unattractive neighborhood in Lisbon to meet her dying husband, Joaquim. Unfortunately or not, she was late, and all she finds is a decaying house and lonely souls moving in and out like shadows in the night.
With a unique visual aesthetic, the camera lurks in the darkness, emphasizing surroundings composed of narrow alleys, simplistic interiors with dim lights, strange passageways, and a small church with regular chairs and a dirt floor, where nobody steps on it anymore except for a desolated priest (Ventura) marked by guilt and hopelessness.
For 20 years, Vitalina waited for a plane ticket that would allow her to finally join her husband, but she never heard of Joaquim. He had left the African island without saying goodbye, abandoning Vitalina and the splendid 10-room house he had built for them but never entered. In Portugal, he worked in the construction field, but it turns out that he became lazy like his drunk comrades, got another woman, and started to sell drugs in order to pay for his modest, poorly-planned house and its meager contents.
The film pulls all this together, leaking the revelations slowly and yielding in a mournful, meditative anticlimax with an idiosyncratic approach to expressionism. Costa’s challenging works (In Vanda’s Room; Colossal Youth; Horse Money) are always marked by this agonizing lethargy that penetrates deep in the skin before biting the soul with pinpoint-accuracy. Although Vitalina Varela is not his best film, it feels like a classy lesson in introspective cinema. It’s a relentlessly grim tale of immigration, suffering, and loneliness that deserves to be contemplated.
Direction: Ant Timpson
Country: USA
Elijah Wood stars in Ant Timpson’s feature film debut, as an emotionally wounded musician who finally meets the father who abandoned him when he was only five. After unmemorable appearances in The Last Witch Hunter (2015) and The Trust (2016), Wood had a promising return with I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017), Macon Blair’s first directorial experience. He did a pretty decent job in Come To Daddy, and it wasn’t his fault that this comedy thriller - filled with cynical lies, wry humor, dark secrets, and violent romps - didn’t impress me all that much.
The screenplay by Toby Harvard carries a number of good intentions, but few of them materialize favorably. Norval Greenwood’s stay at his father’s secluded lakefront cabin in Oregon comes with lots of traps and manipulation. And that was exactly how I felt while watching it - trapped in nonsense and manipulated by artificial maneuvers.
Timpson wanted his film to look weird and wild, but because the lopped storyline is nothing special and the humor is unremarkable, the film goes off the rails sooner than later. He had no other option than using the violent scenes as a lifeline.
Sadly, the positive atmospheric set-up terminates abruptly with the first death. The film never fulfills the potential offered by a farcical yet mysterious inception. And then we have these ridiculous scenes involving slaughterous manhunts that feel more exasperating than frightening.
Direction: Chinonye Chukwu
Country: USA
It’s with feral intensity and profound commitment that Alfre Woodard shapes her performance in Chinonye Chukwu’s thought-provoking death-row drama, Clemency. She is Bernardine Williams, an iron-hand prison warden who, as the years go by, gets deeply affected by the number of deaths she has been connected with. She usually takes the proceedings regarding to each case with such a determination and punctiliousness, but the next prisoner in line, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), brings a considerable change in the way she sees and approaches her job. In truth, Bernardine struggles with sleep disorders, and every time she closes her eyes for a brief minute, the nightmares haunt her mercilessly. She’s been unable to maintain a normal life for the recent times, and what had been a solid marriage with her supportive husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), a dedicated teacher, seems to be crumbling fast.
The fragility of her emotional state is amplified, especially because there are serious doubts about if Woods really killed the cop for which he was convicted 15 years before. Despite the multiple appeals of his lawyer, Marty Lumetta (Richard Schiff), and daily public demonstrations outside the prison, no clemency is given.
This is Chukwu’s sophomore feature film and a solid step forward in her short yet promising filmmaking career. Balanced in tone and devastating in its conclusion, Clemency provides a refreshing alternative to the death-row-themed movies, addressing the problem from an uncommon angle.
Direction: May el-Toukhy
Country: Denmark
Hailing from Denmark, Queen of Hearts is a spellbinding tale of luxury crammed with sexual tension and moral controversy. Co-writter Maren Louise Käehne and director May el-Toukhy had teamed up before in Long Story Short (2015).
With a razor-sharp performance, Trine Dyrholm can be classified as the director’s secret weapon, contributing heavily for the film’s triumph. She is Anne, a successful lawyer and mother of two who seduces her 17-year-old stepson, Gustav (Gustav Lindh), recently after he has joined the family. The explicitness of the sex scenes was an object of severe criticism, but they served to make the story more real, painful, and intensely felt. This moody drama has its pinnacle point when Anne’s secret is blatantly exposed. The situation still casts some doubt in her husband, Peter (Magnus Krepper), and that's when the remorseless Ann is forced to make a decision between her family/career and Gustav. Which will be preserved and which will be destroyed?
Queen of Hearts is a scandalous guilty pleasure that works so well because it’s patiently build with methodical accuracy and brutal authenticity. By focusing on a woman whose exploitative voluptuousness she coldly accepts, el-Toukhy provides us with a tough viewing, but not a superficial experience.
Direction: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan
The filmmaking style of Japanese auteur Takashi Miike doesn’t fit standard molds and conventions. However, and despite the classically twisted backbone of his latest work, First Love, he takes a more archetypal approach as he tells the story of a promising, if hopeless, down-on-his-luck boxer (Masataka Kubota) who bumps into a fragile woman (Sakurako Konishi) turned into a prostitute by the Yakuza. Inspired by the idea of Muneyuki Kii, who also produces, deft screenwriter Masa Nakamura (The Bird People in China) devises an exhilarating one-night ride into the mundane circumstances of contemporary Tokyo. There, you will find Chinese and Japanese triads clashing for power, greedy gangsters (Shota Sometani, Seiyo Uchino), a corrupt cop (Nao Omori), and a determined female assassin (Mami Fujioka).
And this boundless universe of crime is enriched with guns, swords, punches, and a furious driving scene where “trust in Japanese cars” is advertised before a brief yet colorful animated section appears before your eyes. The humor is taken to the limit and the film is infused with hilarious pranks - can you imagine a dying guy having to deal with an unexpected hard-on?
Thus, Miike’s inventive genius is still present, including his obsession for violent and dark contexts to satirize a sickening society, but the film doesn’t match the brilliant weirdness of some of his previous flicks. As expected, the romance was not as wild as the action, and the lurid aesthetics never compensate the overstuffness of the plot. It’s a visceral experience, nonetheless.
Direction: Edward Norton
Country: USA
Edward Norton writes, produces, directs and stars in Motherless Brooklyn, a neo-noir detective story set in 1950’s New York City. The storyline was carved out from the 1999 novel of the same name by Jonathan Lethem and follows the tortuous paths of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a private detective with Tourette’s syndrome that investigates the assassination of his cool-under-pressure mentor, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), shot dead with his own gun.
The man behind this dark curtain is Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), an autocrat obsessed with power. As a city planner, he takes control of every construction site in the city, and not even his brother, Paul (Willem Dafoe), a frustrated dreamer, copes with his ways. In the course of the investigation, Lionel locates Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an African-American activist from Harlem, who, he believes, could know something about Frank’s death. However, she was just looking to dismantle a fraudulent real estate scheme and now faces the dangers of opposing the gangster squad behind it.
Motherless Brooklyn lingers too much time in jazz numbers and attempts to romanticize what it's not romantic. Intermittently interesting at an early stage, the film keeps oscillating between solid and patchy, and eventually grows in disappointment as climaxes and thrills are taken to a minimum. The supporting performances are strong, but the machine assembled by Norton is far from well-oiled. Unfortunately, the narrative descends into retro boredom and, instead of something gripping and intellectually capable, you’ll find occasional sincerity but few emotion.
Direction: Jan Komasa
Country: Poland
It’s not surprising that Corpus Christi, a drama film directed by Jan Komasa (Suicide Room) and written by Mateusz Pacewicz, make it to final Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film in a proud representation of Poland cinema. Engrossing all the way through, the film tells a riveting story based on true facts, focusing on an empathetic young inmate whose religious beliefs take him to miraculous places.
All of a sudden, 20-year-old Daniel (newcomer Bartosz Bielenia is outstanding), sees himself out of the tumultuous juvenile prison in Warsaw, where he spent the last few years for a violent crime, to work on parole in a sawmill in a small countryside village. However, in opposition to what was supposed to, he seeks redemption for his crimes by impersonating the town’s new expected priest and actually helping its disoriented parishioners to overcome their burdens. He gradually adapts to this new life, metamorphosing completely into his new character and introducing innovative methods of spiritual liberation. Yet, he refuses to abide by the catholic conventions, working according to his own intuition.
Impeccably written and powerfully acted, Corpus Christi is one of the most daring foreign films of 2019. This raw depiction of a dream came true (Daniel truly aspired to become a priest) is framed with a careful composition and beautiful faint light, and comes loaded with the right blend of tension, violence, spiritual intention, and good-will. The wit is mordantly dark and one just has to settle back and let this tremendous account do the rest. Expect to be knocked out by a devastatingly potent finale.
