Three features in, Arthur Harari might be one of those filmmakers whose career resists easy categorization. Beginning with Dark Inclusion (2015), he followed it with the almost unbelievable true story of Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, and now, with The Unknown (read review), making perhaps his strangest film yet: a metaphysical body-swap mystery that begins with Parisian photographer meeting a mysterious woman named Eva at a party — and waking the next morning inside her body. Adapted from Le Cas David Zimmerman, the graphic novel by Harari’s brother Lucas, The Unknown gives Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider one of the film’s most fascinating challenges: each must inhabit not only another character, but another body, another identity and ultimately another way of looking.… Read the rest
It’s perhaps fortuitous for Lance Oppenheim’s narrative debut Primetime, which charts the brief but meteoric run of Chris Hansen’s exploitative hit television series To Catch a Predator in 2006, premieres and competes alongside Danny Boyle’s Ink (which reenacts the Rupert Murdoch/Larry Lamb bastardization of news journalism with their sensationalistic revamp of The Sun in 1969, London). Master manipulators whose narcissism led to crossed boundaries which bred on ignorance, titillation, and schadenfreude, it’s definitely worth noting how unremarkable these men ultimately seem when the privilege of anonymity is removed. As far as Oppenheim’s first foray into narrative filmmaking is concerned, it’s mostly a mildly satirical portrait of a banal, mediocre egotist hellbent on achieving the celebrity status he felt he deserved, focusing on the various elements of a business model as perverted as the criminals it was exploiting, poisoning minds already unschooled, hardening hearts suspiciously gleeful to maim, and further cementing mob rule mentality.… 
Healing comes in baby steps — and dance steps in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s warm and rebellious third feature film outing. Conjoining the absurd with reality-check seriousness, like a trendy fusion restaurant, Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! blends cultures, genres, languages, tones and various states of melancholy with unexpected buoyancy making for a film where the past tense exists in the present. Playing the one left behind, Rinko Kikuchi is in exquisite comedic form, anchoring the film with a character who is open, wounded, and flawed. Its flirtation with schmaltz, paired with an overuse of humor, blunts what might otherwise be a more piercing reckoning with grief, however, on the flip-side, the Japan-set, trilingual tug-of-war with memory is deeply in tune with ideas of rebirth and the subtle, interior work of renewal and emerges as a cathartic charmer.… 
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is an ambitiously rich, arthouse flavored action film that marks a step up for filmmaker Bassam Tariq and is easily Mahershala Ali’s best role and performance since Moonlight. After revealing a striking command of form and feeling with Mogul Mowgli, we find the familiar machinery of the hitman movie but this is something far more intimate and spiritually searching.