Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for December 2016

The Blackcoat’s Daughter

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis

Playing out in gloomy interiors and frigid exteriors, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) is a stealth weapon. Slow and seductive and deliberately vague, this deeply unsettling tale of lost parents and troubled daughters exudes atmosphere while hoarding facts. Yet the movie is so perfectly acted and gorgeously filmed (the cinematographer is Julie Kirkwood) that we don’t mind its coyness; the twanging notes of trepidation make us almost grateful for the leisurely build. [Read more…]

The Witch

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Anthony Lane

A father and his son, a boy of twelve or so, go into a wood. They are out hunting, armed with a gun. As they walk, they engage in one of those ordinary, man-to-man chats that arise on a country stroll. “Canst thou tell me what thy corrupt nature is?” the father asks. “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin, and that continually,” the lad replies. Clearly, he has learned the words by rote, yet they don’t sound tired or hollow in his mouth; he means them. His next task is to help with the traps that have been laid in the undergrowth. We watch his small hands slowly easing wide the iron jaws. These scenes are from The Witch (2015), a film written and directed by Robert Eggers.

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Embrace of the Serpent

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

“The horror! The horror!” The terminal valediction of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is deconstructed with a raging eloquence in the Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s majestic, spellbinding film, Embrace of the Serpent (2105). Is the unspeakable savagery evoked by his dying words really beyond the reach of the civilized imagination? I doubt it. [Read more…]

The Tribe

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Ben Sachs

The Tribe (2014) is a brilliant formal achievement that marks Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky as a filmmaker to watch. It takes place at a boarding school for deaf children, with all the roles played by deaf performers; the dialogue is entirely in Ukrainian sign language, and there are no subtitles or narration to translate the conversations for hearing viewers. (Even those schooled in American Sign Language will be baffled.) Slaboshpitsky uses ingenious strategies to draw the audience into the characters’ world while respecting fundamental differences between the deaf and the hearing. The film, his feature debut, is never less than tantalizing, bringing us close enough to the subjects to inspire fascination but not close enough to establish thorough understanding. For hearing viewers, Slaboshpitsky approximates the experience of being deaf, and in that regard the film is a valuable provocation. [Read more…]

It Follows

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

The nameless, shape-shifting horror that stalks the blond, 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) in David Robert Mitchell’s cool, controlled horror film, It Follows (2014), might be described as the very incarnation of paranoia. The menace, which only she can see, takes any number of forms, from a naked man standing on the roof of a house to an unsmiling old lady heading purposefully in her direction. When it appears, it is usually first glimpsed from a distance, walking slowly toward her like an expressionless zombie. Although Jay repeatedly flees, she can never shake the sense that it is out there somewhere and knows her precise location. [Read more…]

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Manhola Dargis

By the time the vampire in the chador is skateboarding down a dark, desolate street, the director Ana Lily Amirpour has ensured that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) will roll on in your memory. The vampire, a Persian-speaking waif called the Girl (Sheila Vand), also wears a striped fishing shirt and an occasional smear across her mouth that isn’t lipstick. She’s taken the skateboard from a nameless tyke (Milad Eghbali), whose indomitable quality and threadbare clothes evoke the children populating Abbas Kiarostami’s early films and, in turn, those of Italian neorealism. Whatever the inspiration, the kid is just one of a number of character types drifting through Ms. Amirpour’s cinematic fun house. [Read more…]

Under The Skin

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Geoffrey O’Brien

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is a film with the courage of its silences and ellipses. Most easily categorized as a species of science fiction, it deftly evades verbal explanation and explicit continuity. It is in fact based on a well-received science fiction novel by Michel Faber, concerning an alien being who has been sent to northern Scotland in the guise of a woman to pick up and trap men for consumption by other aliens. But Glazer seems to have ended by omitting most of the narrative content of his source, taking away backstory and motivation bit by bit until what is left is deliberately fragmentary and open-ended. [Read more…]

Maria Bamford: The Special Special Special!

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jason Zinoman

What the comedian Maria Bamford really wants is the approval of her parents.

That’s not armchair analysis. In The Special Special Special! (2012), which she released online at chill.com, Ms. Bamford performs an hour of stand-up for her mother and father as they sit on a couch. By replacing a typical audience with her original one, she breathes life into a cliché by making it literal and creates a compelling dynamic that is as eccentric as her singularly funny comedy.  [Read more…]

Post Tenebras Lux

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Manohla Dargis

Mesmerizing, mysterious, willfully perverse, the Mexican movie Post Tenebras Lux (2012) opens with two scenes, one realistic, the other fantastical. In the first a toddler roams across a muddy country field at dusk as thunder booms and dogs chase cows, horses and donkeys.

It’s a cacophonous, stunning sequence. The edges of the images are softly blurred, the light is magical — although it isn’t remotely clear what that girl and those animals have to do with the following scene of a red, radiant devil with horns, hooves, swishing tail and a literal toolbox entering a house at night, like a handyman from Hades on an emergency call. It’s no wonder that a young boy in the house who sees this bizarre apparition stops cold to gawk. [Read more…]

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

Last May, when a Cannes Film Festival jury headed by Tim Burton awarded the Palme d’Or (2011), there was widespread surprise and a few eruptions of outrage. The film — from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has become a familiar presence on the festival circuit over the past decade — is unquestionably strange, at times mystifyingly oblique. Those who insist on a linear narrative or an easily identifiable set of themes may find themselves puzzled, perhaps to the point of frustration. But it is hard to see how this movie, with its contemplative mood and genial, curious spirit, could make anybody angry. On the contrary: encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss. [Read more…]

Take Shelter

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

“You’ve got a good life, Curtis,” says Dewart, Curtis’s best friend and co-worker. (Dewart is played by Shea Whigham, Curtis by the amazing Michael Shannon.) “I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man: take a look at his life and say, ‘That’s good.’ ”

A sinister corollary to Dewart’s homespun truism might be that the greatest fear a man can experience is that of losing the good life he has. It is this anxiety, which afflicts Curtis in especially virulent form, that defines the mood of Take Shelter (2011), Jeff Nichols’s remarkable new film. It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.

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Dogtooth

By

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Peter Bradshaw

A black-comic poem of dysfunction, a veritable operetta of self-harm, this brilliant and bizarre film from the Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos is superbly acted and icily controlled – it grips from the very first scenes. Development does not get more arrested than this. Dogtooth (2010) could be read as a superlative example of absurdist cinema, or possibly something entirely the reverse – a clinically, unsparingly intimate piece of psychological realism. Watching this, and alternately gaping at the unselfconsciously shocking scenes of violence, thwarted sexuality and unexpressed sibling grief, I was reminded of Alan Bennett’s maxim that all families have a secret: they are not like other families. But I can’t imagine any family being quite as unlike others as this. [Read more…]