Magnificent Obsession: Franco Finds Love is a Hopeless Place
Michel Franco lassos Jessica Chastain into his continued class conflict examinations in Dreams, an intimate portrait of a doomed love affair ruined by power hierarchies. Reuniting with Chastain after 2023’s Memory (read review), Franco fashions his headliner as an elitist who chooses to remain oblivious about her exploitative tendencies, even while seemingly head-over-heels in love with a younger, Mexican dancer. Ironically, they share similar versions of the same dream, and clearly neither are being realistic about what the end goal is supposed to look like. Toxic tendencies from both parties generate shifting balances of control, with which Franco spins his wheels on until he’s ready to deliver the venom and violence underlining nearly all his films.… Read the rest
Watching something like Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) reifies the exceptional and unique nature of human connection and friendship, a tribute from directors Anna Fitch and Banker White for their deceased friend, Yolonda Shea. At the same time, it is a multi-layered documentary exercise so personally specific, it really only justifies itself as an exercise in catharsis for those who made it. Certainly, there’s a time and place for audiences to seek out and enjoy discovering remnants of this outspoken woman who lived life by her own rules, but ultimately, there’s something a bit too personal, a bit too detached, like we’re eavesdropping on a stranger’s home videos during an unexpected stretch of free time in a captive vacuum.… 
Nestled deep down inside the core of Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars is a compelling narrative worthy of the pristine cinematography of DP Mathieu Giombini and the striking beauty of actor Maïmouna Miawama, making her debut. But the latest title from Chadian auteur 
For his debut film, A New Dawn, animator Yoshitoshi Shinomiya marries bureaucratic takeovers, environmental issues, and broken family ties into a narrative which feels like a beautifully illustrated template for a schizophrenic dreamscape. An almost breathlessly paced running time oddly juggles dramatic catalysts and zany characterizations as it hurtles towards its predictable explosion of a mythical firework’s illegal debut as a desperate attempt to showcase how a frivolous pastime might indeed be the artistic display reminding us all of an innate interconnectedness with the universe.
A universal thematic thread of the past haunting its central characters in conflicting ways is tackled in the Pakistani production Lali. Director Sarmad Sultan Khoosat’s fourth feature is an at times confusing but vividly authentic vision of the types of matriarchal, patriarchal and domineering forces that consume traditional South Asian relationships and values. An admirably bloated effort that could have used a bit more nuance that we found in Khoosat’s recently produced Joyland (2022) by Saim Sadiq.
The most succinct aspect of Singaporean filmmaker 
