Latest
Igor Fishman
writer. film critic.
United States
New York-based critic with bylines in: In Review Online, The Quietus, Ultra Dogme, and A Good Movie to Watch.
United States
New York-based critic with bylines in: In Review Online, The Quietus, Ultra Dogme, and A Good Movie to Watch.
Latest
The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev's debut feature The Whaler Boy takes us to the far reaches of the Chukotka Peninsula, the northeastern edge of Russia's territory, with only fifty-five miles of Bering Strait separating it from Alaska and the United States.
Memoria opens with a sound; booming, leaden, ominous, a sound that shakes you in your seat and fades as quickly as it came. Like "a ball of concrete falling down a metal well" or "a rumble from the core of earth," all descriptors thrown its way come up short.
If Pedro Almodóvar's pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest feature crystallizes this as fact. His first feature since the success of Pain & Glory finds Almodóvar in peak form, delivering a work of intertwining narrative...
Highlights
Jean-Honoré Fragonard's 1778 painting "The Souvenir," which captures with Rococo gentility a young woman carving her lover's initials into a tree, is the central object and metaphor of Joanna Hogg's quietly dazzling 2019 feature which shares its title.
Scarecrow forms an emphatic portrait of a timeless story, a person denied by their community despite their gifts and sacrifices, and the desperate conditions that foster this rejection.
There is No Evil is frequently, starkly poignant, but it's successes are somewhat mitigated by a lack of culminating cohesion.
A chandelier swings in the gloom, tremulous strings kick in and tension mounts as the camera pulls in. The glinting fixture rocks back and forth through the inky blackness.
When I was growing up I kept a memory box for keepsakes. Being sentimental and shy meant each trip outside warranted souvenirs. These could be little things: a drugstore receipt or a random business card would do, anything to keep the memory intact.
As the pandemic nears a one-year mark, it can feel like we're going around in circles. We survived 2020 only to wind up right back where we started. Of course, things have changed to an extent - the seismic impact of the U.S.