Ioncinema

It is Seldom That a Dream Comes True: Sachs Sends Regard with Poignant Elegy

In the realm of contemporary queer auteurs, there isn’t anyone quite like Ira Sachs and his collaborating writer/partner Mauricio Zacharias who utilize cinema as a medium of arthouse recuperation. For the past twenty years, Sachs has delivered a wide ranging display of queer experiences and interactions, often informed by direct deliberations with obscure inspirations that might otherwise be left dormant or undiscovered, such as 2025’s Peter Hujar’s Day. Working in a similar vein of intergenerational splicing is their latest marvel, The Man I Love, a title relating to the track written by Ira Gershwin, one of two stirring songs performed by lead Rami Malek, who has the novel opportunity to tackle a role which allows him to explore and flesh out all the tics and travesties of a larger than life persona cut short by AIDS.… Read the rest

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Lost Illusions: Marre Administers Plodding Portrait of an Opportunist

“There’s nothing worse than being bored with a boring man,” according to French writer Antoine Laurain. The statement applies to both the subject and the film Notre salut (A Man of His Time), an ambitious sophomore film from Emmanuel Marre, who perhaps overestimated the sustained interest an audience might have for a milquetoast Nazi collaborator named Henri Marre (a fictionalized account of the director’s own grandfather). While there’s much to enjoy from the lead performance from Swann Arlaud, who somehow manages to make crushing passivity part of the characterization rather than a perfunctory mechanism, Marre can’t quite wrench this saga (with a running time of two-and-a-half-hours) from the grip of banality.… Read the rest

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Deep Sea, Baby: Kotzamani Goes Down Where It’s Wetter

Greek filmmaker Konstantina Kotzamani heads to Japan for her directorial debut, Titanic Ocean, its fanciful title a reference to the private reminiscences of a young woman who is heavily involved in training to earn a coveted position in a niche market known as ‘mermaid show business.’ Like a live-action inverse of The Little Mermaid, an intense training program finds a coterie of willowy women adopting new personas and aesthetics as they learn to leave their land bodies behind, at least temporarily. As a result, it’s a somewhat thematically and metaphorically amphibious venture which, like the Hans Christian Anderson classic it evokes, has everything to do with finding one’s own voice.… Read the rest

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The only title to have had its world premiere prior to hitting the south of France is Bitter Christmas from Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar. The El Deseo factory is no stranger to the fest — but it wasn’t until Best Director winning All About My Mother (1999) where he became a frequent guest. The Golden Lion winner with no Palme d’Or has brought Bad Education (2004), Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), The Skin I Live In (2011), Julieta (2016), Pain and Glory (2019), and short Strange Way of Life (2023) to the Croisette exploring his usual themes of desire, performance and reinvention, motherhood and melodrama with a large touch of queer.… Read the rest

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The Cranes Aren’t Flying: Zvyagintsev Unleashes Primordial Tendencies

“They always end disastrously,” Kate Burton advises Diane Lane of extramarital affairs in Adrian Lyne’s 2002 erotic thriller Unfaithful, a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 classic An Unfaithful Wife. It ends up being an extreme understatement for what transpires in those texts, as well as the affair at the center of the latest domestic drama from Andrey Zvyagintsev, the Russian auteur’s first feature in nearly a decade (following 2017’s divorce debacle, Loveless). Fleshing out a perfect storm of intersecting world events in modern day Russia which significantly impact workplace ethics, a jealous husband is driven over the edge by his neglected wife’s all-consuming affair.… Read the rest

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We nearly lost this master filmmaker during the Covid pandemic and so Minotaur counts as Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first oeuvre after being hospitalized for a year and his debut work outside his homeland. His feature debut The Return (2003) won the Golden Lion and Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best First Film, and every single other film has premiered in Cannes competition (oddly 2011’s Elena was mysteriously programmed in the Un Certain Regard section). Following 2007’s The Banishment, Best Screenplay winning Leviathan (2014) and Jury Prize winning Loveless (2017), this new film is set against the backdrop of a provincial Russian small town in 2022, it follows business executive Gleb is on the verge of laying off his employees when he discovers his wife is having an affair.… Read the rest

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What Have They Done to Your Daughters?: Refn Returns with Vacuous Vengeance

After disappearing into television for the past decade, Nicolas Winding Refn once again rears into the cinema with Her Private Hell, which unfortunately is an insufferable, nonsensical exercise suggesting his narrative coffers remain empty. While it would appear Refn desires to channel a Lynchian nightmare subconscious realm, the extravagant neon-lit demimonde from DP Magnus Nordenhof Jønck aligns more with a Tron-inspired music video mentality, exploring ambiguous themes about eroding kinship roles between fathers and their daughters who are routinely devoured by an exploitative entertainment industry informed by a misogynistic culture.… Read the rest

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Uncanny Valley: Mungiu Explores Liberated Prisons

Totalitarian mentality is driven to logical extremes in Fjord, Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s first foray outside of his native country, named for the deep, underwater valleys formed by glaciers common to the geography of Norway. As Mungiu is wont to do, he’s once again excavating the attitudes and anxieties hidden beneath the surface, as the title implies, returning once again to religion as impetus for cultural turmoil (as he did prior with his 2012 masterpiece Beyond the Hills). In an increasingly topsy turvy world, notions of victims and villains have become less delineated, which might explain why the agonizing ethical dilemma he’s dissecting takes on the pallor of a dark comedy more than ever before.… Read the rest

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Years We Fell Apart: Razo Resurrects the Final Throes of Childhood

For his first narrative feature, documentary filmmaker Bruno Santamaría Razo utilizes a docu-hybrid in Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, an enigmatic title grasping at the wisps of memory from his own childhood related to a health scare involving his father. Set in Mexico City in the early 1990s, Razo anchors a cathartic exploration of a specific period of time by interviewing his mother regarding her interpretation of what was going on when their family was suddenly thrust into distress as they awaited confirmation of his father’s potential HIV diagnosis.… Read the rest

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The Romanian master filmmaker Cristian Mungiu moves away from a backdrop he knows far too well to explore the family unit way further up north. Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2007 for his sophomore feature 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Mungiu has stock piled the Croisette with Best Actress and Best Screenplay winning Beyond the Hills (2012), Best Director winning Graduation (2016), and the criminally neglected RMN in (2022). His 2002 debut Occident was also a Croisette offering for the Directors’ Fortnight and so were Tales from the Golden Age and Bridges of Sarajevo (2014). With Fjord — we find Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve topline this as the Gheorghiu family — about a Romanian father and a Norwegian mother, who have moved to the mother’s birthplace, a remote Norwegian village, and befriend the neighboring Halberg family.… Read the rest

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