REVIEW: Napszállta [Sunset] [2018]

It’s starting all over again. I felt as though I was running circles throughout László Nemes‘ sophomore effort Napszállta [Sunset]. It doesn’t help that we’re often inches from Írisz Leiter’s (Juli Jakab) face—if not looking through her very eyes—as she winds her way through an unfamiliar and just out of focus Budapest, Hungary. I speak more of the narrative propulsion and metaphorical implications of the whole, though. Here’s a young woman stubbornly interjecting her way into the lives of strangers and yet constantly walking off to chase a clue about…

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REVIEW: Ruben Brandt, Collector [2018]

Characters from famous paintings continue to attack me. Writer/director Milorad Krstic has combined his love for painting and film into an action thriller as surreal as it is familiar. The whole uses his own unique animation style as a filter with which to recreate masterpieces of both visual mediums—each famed piece simultaneously recognizable as its real life counterpart and integrated into the over-arching aesthetic onscreen. Think Modigliani (with his elongated faces and pasted on noses) by way of Picasso (with a Cubist sensibility fracturing norms to include three eyes or…

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REVIEW: Mindenki [Sing] [2016]

“Well life isn’t always fair, my dear” A new candidate for cinema’s best villain of 2016 emerges out of Kristóf Deák‘s Hungarian short Mindenki [Sing]. Her name is Miss Erika (Zsófia Szamosi), the Middle School choir conductor in charge of her school’s nationally recognized troupe of youngsters readying to defend their previous championships. She seems so wonderful and the kids who love her love her, but there’s more to her actions than kind-hearted and pure leadership leaving each student with a chocolate candy upon class end. Beneath this façade adored…

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REVIEW: Saul fia [Son of Saul] [2015]

“You failed the living for the dead” It’s stunning how all these years later a Holocaust film can come along and prove wholly unique from the myriad examples we’ve already received and lauded. But László Nemes‘ directorial debut Saul Fia [Son of Saul] does exactly that. Not only does he capture the brutality by entering into the bowels of 1944 Auschwitz amongst the men and women going to their deaths in the showers or the pits, he somehow exposes the numbness felt by those forced to assist the Nazis in…

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