What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Sorogoyen Visualizes Dysfunction & Creative Catharsis
Although it’s a familiar trope, an absent father utilizing a complex ruse to reunite with a child abandoned from a previous relationship, Rodrigo Sorogoyen distills potential extremes into robust parameters depending heavily on shifting visual formats to display fluctuating emotional conflicts roiling in the depths. Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo (Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, 2024) spar as a father and daughter tossed together, arguably on a misguided whim bordering on hubris from the estranged parent, as they commence working on a film, neither quite realizing how tension will be alleviated or potential expiation received.… Read the rest
Somehow, despite being set in the ‘not too distant future,’ Hirokzau Kore-eda’s twee take on robotic children in Sheep in the Box manages to seem like an anachronistic blast from the past. Its title, lifted from the classic 1943 children’s novella The Little Prince, is a thematic reference to how imagination allows us to explore what really matters is on the inside. With a plot usually utilized in nightmarish genre films with robots or cloning (think B-movie drivel, such as 2004’s Godsend), a Japanese couple mourning the loss of their kidnapped son from two years prior are headhunted for a promotional offer to receive his likeness duplicated as a completely passable humanoid robot.… 
You can’t go home again and it’s a disaster to even try, especially as evidenced in Valentina Maurel’s Forever Your Maternal Animal, a dark comedy of sorts about a willfully oblivious family who could serve as a case study for attachment theory issues. Essentially a tale of a nuclear family who have long since dispensed with any sense of selflessness as regards their commitment to one another, Maurel focuses on the prodigal Elsa, returning to Costa Rica as a way to flee some relationship issues she’s experienced whilst studying abroad in Europe.… 
“No one ever wanted her forever,” is a partial description of the titular character in Gail Parent’s 1972 novel 
In the midst of what ends up being a transformative month for the principal players in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film All of a Sudden, there’s an experimental play serving as a thematic catalyst called Up Close, No One is Normal. The statement is a central thesis regarding the necessary grace and patience required to keep civilization afloat, at least within the crumbling framework of capitalism, another major bullet point discussed quite avidly. Basically composed of a handful of lengthy conversations transpiring in June, 2025, Hamaguchi’s French language debut bears all the earmarks of the painstaking characterizations he’s celebrated for.… 
