Let the White One In: Affleck Can’t Satisfy the Hunger
Like many actors who doggedly pursue a parallel career as film directors, Casey Affleck manages to present interesting ideas without really sensing the best way to execute them. Such is the case for his strange new swing with third feature Company, a Russian doll narrative of nestled storytelling which takes nearly two thirds of its running time to confirm the monotonous menace is all about vampires. While its pacing is most assuredly a problem, some poorly directed performances scuttle the premise and its curious, eventually overly fussy, framing devices. Perhaps never before, even within the vast annals of Anne Rice, have vampires seemed so underwhelming in their piety or self-righteousness.… Read the rest
As far as horrific moral fables about Catholic guilt and resisting temptation go, director Paolo Strippoli unleashes a doozy with his fourth feature, The Spiral. Had an inventive producer been so inclined, Strippoli could have even involved with the ongoing effort to recruit a coterie of international directors to remake each chapter of Kieslowski’s Dekalog (thus far contributed to by Asghar Farhadi, and in a rather circuitous sense, Lee Chang-dong). False idols, murder, covetousness—-these are but a few of the felonious errors committed by a desperate mother played with sublimely oblivious menace by 
Art is both the impetus for destruction and creation in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, Look Back, a live-action adaptation of the 2024 animated film of the same title (based on the 
Our conditioned notions regarding beauty standards maintains our insidious and unhealthy fixation with obtaining (or maintaining) those attributes which remain most culturally celebrated. Despite ameliorative messaging wielded as a superficial nexus regarding individuality and loving one’s self, it’s often a paltry counter to the mental sabotage waged so prolifically it becomes a normalized part of our interiority. Such sentiments are barely more than a mantra designed as numbing lip service. In a world where GLP-1s have drastically changed a cultural shift in perceptions of body positivity, it seems the temptation is too great to turn down an opportunity to have the attributes once presumably out of reach—-and thus, presents scenarios whereby champions of self acceptance become disappointingly complicit in mutating to fit such standards.… 
Something is certainly rotten in the state of Denmark following the country’s liberation from Nazi occupation in May el-Touky’s third feature Woman Unknown, a bleak, dismal portrait of women determined to be ‘horizontal collaborators’ as a means of survival. Part of the problem was the rubber band effect of heteropatriachy for countries desiring to return a sense of normalcy whilst also ‘righting the wrongs’ of those who who’d become ‘too’ friendly with the Nazis, while political and economic factors assisted in determining who would be irrevocably banished from polite society.… 
For his narrative feature debut Oasis, Jannis Lenz channels contemporary intergenerational neglect and the inherent apathy accompanying the rigid tenets of masculinity. It’s a narrative redolent of countless narratives dealing with the increasingly violent tendencies of a contemporary generation, though mass desensitization via social media has arguably created new mutations on the continuum of discord which tends to universally define the terrors and traumas of adolescence. It’s clear trouble lies ahead for the nubile protagonists from its opening frames, conjuring Santigold’s “Disparate Youth,” warning us (and them), “Don’t look ahead, there’s stormy weather.”…