The Killing of a Sacred Dogtooth: Ainouz Paints with Contempt
Karim Aïnouz doesn’t so much eat the rich as he does regurgitate them in his latest feature, Rosebush Pruning, a hyper stylized rehash of Marco Bellocchio’s breakout classic, Fists in the Pocket (1965). Tonally, this feels much more like a dead end tangent to the Greek Weird Wave thanks to screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, who seems to have approached Bellocchio’s masterwork as a sordid sequel to The Lobster (2015). Aïnouz, whose previous feature Motel Destino (2024) attempted to resuscitate The Postman Always Rings Twice through a vaguely queer lens, lustily follows a similar pattern of lost souls indefinitely confined within the very abode which defines and sustains their existence.… Read the rest
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm adds to the subgenre of motherhood body horror with Nightborn (Yön Lapsi), an arguably more contained palette than her 2022 debut Hatching, which similarly dealt with female body image expectations and dysfunctional kinship roles. Her latest feels more like situational comedy, whereby a woman’s ‘madness’ is triggered by a couple’s move to an isolated, dilapidated family home in the eerie thickness of a fairy style primed Finnish forest. Settling into a familiar groove, it’s a film wherein the idiosyncratic wavelength’s success depends solely on the increasingly untethered lead performance from Seidi Haarla, who certainly throws herself admirably into full tilt weird.… 
With his first narrative feature in nearly a decade, French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis formulates a complex tapestry with Dao, which is defined as “a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites.” The key words here are ‘flow’ and ‘unites,’ as Gomis throws everything and the kitchen sink into a freewheeling docudrama which feels akin to navigating a Cristi Puiu ensemble. Impressively assembled with much to admire, there are moments which often suggest the film could be a masterpiece. However, there’s also often a meandering, even lethargic pacing as the narrative flits between two key events in Paris and Guinea-Bissau, and it often feels like a more fastidiously edited cut might assist in honing its three-hour plus running time into something more elegant.… 
Following his Academy Award nominated The Teacher’s Lounge (2023), Turkish-German director Ilker Çatak conjures a more overt political exercise in Yellow Letters (Gelbe Briefe). Set in Ankara and Istanbul (with German cities Berlin and Hamburg standing in for Turkey), a well-heeled artistic family finds themselves unnecessarily maligned by the state amidst a growing wave of fascism in the country. The exact political ramifications aren’t exactly spelled out as the family scrambles to regain their bearings after their views find them receiving the titular correspondences which run them out of their professions and then their home, but it’s clear any sort of criticism or resistance to those in power is cause enough.… 
Even in the democratic and social federal state of contemporary Germany, all is not sublime in the low-wage sector, relayed with an agonizing spasm in director 
Much like the shifting ideals and hard won identities defining the protagonists of 
