My experience with the minimalist work of Kelly Reichardt is limited. I had disliked her drab period piece Meek’s Cutoff, but I seemed to be in the minority; I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But after watching her latest drama First Cow, another dull yet highly acclaimed period piece, I’m sticking by my guns but I’m not so forgiving.
By: Trevor Chartrand Between the imminent threat of attack, the dank living conditions and the terrible rations, there’s no nightmare worse than enduring trench warfare. Filmmaker Saul Dibb dares to depict these WWI conditions in Journey’s End, a gritty war drama with intense realism. To be clear, this isn’t a film that celebrates war heroes or glorifies the battlefield. Instead, the film follows a group of soldiers who are faced with the inevitable promise of death,…
It has been five years since Michael Haneke’s last film, the Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning Amour. In that time, the world has been witness to ISIS execution videos, murders on Facebook Live, and the livestreaming of someone’s brutal death after an auto accident. With that much material, Haneke has returned with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant to gift the world Happy End, a film that looks at modern technology’s ability to capture atrocities, set within…
In the mid-2000’s, a copy of Caché in a Rogers Video would be my introduction to the works of Michael Haneke, and what an introduction it was. I had heard of a shocking moment in Caché, and I was still unprepared for it. A decade later, I had seen every feature that Haneke had made, always salivating for the next. This is why it was such a shock to me when I was told that,…
Michael Haneke’s Happy End looks at modern technology’s ability to capture atrocities, through a sort-of-sequel to Amour, again following the Laurents through a series of misfortunes.
By: Addison Wylie Berberian Sound Studio didn’t frighten me. It didn’t creep, weird, or freak me out either. I didn’t get any sort of shivers out of the experience nor did I get any heebies or jeebies. If Peter Strickland’s film is anything, it’s mildly unsettling. It smartly pleads the case that our imaginations can provide strokes of detail if a film supplies the foundation for which our thoughts are built on. It’s absolutely true…