Tourists in Amsterdam typically stop at the Anne Frank House, but the ever-moving conga line of visitors tends to work against reflecting on the reality of its rooms. Steve McQueen’s Occupied City opens up a space for contemplation of a hundred-plus houses, buildings, and other sites across Amsterdam that are marked by World War II and the Holocaust in some way, tracing scars and trauma that may no longer be visible, much less widely known.  Informed by an illustrated book by McQueen’s partner, Bianca Stigter (who directed Three Minutes: A Lengthening), it’s a living atlas: scenes of pandemic-era Amsterdam, overlaid […]

German filmmaker Wim Wenders has two new features in Cannes this year, one of which, Anselm, is a documentary portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer. Like Pina (2011)—his filmed portrait of the late Tanztheater dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch—Anselm was shot and projected in 3D (his fourth solo feature to be filmed in the format, with a fifth already on the way), reasserting Wenders’ dedication to the format at a time when few filmmakers in the industry not named James Cameron or Ang Lee continue to explore it.  Kiefer’s work, like Bausch’s, is naturally accommodating to 3D photography. Filmed at various […]

Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, which premiered as a Special Screening at this year’s Cannes, begins as a parodic reworking of the filmmaker’s last feature, 2014’s Jauja. There, Viggo Mortensen played a Danish captain crossing inhospitable Argentinian territory in the 1880s with his daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), while encountering what from his perspective are “natives” to be fearfully avoided; Eureka renders that feature’s “not without my daughter” elements as a black-and-white Western set in an indeterminate any-Western-town of America. Mortensen and Agger are once again father-and-child, but this time he’s a considerably dirtier and more disreputable cowboy type. In impeccable academy-ratio black-and-white with rounded […]

If a screenplay packs a big reveal, in which everything you think you know about the lead character is immediately upended, does the film live and die by its twist? Or is it even considered a twist when said reveal arrives 20 minutes into a 112-minute feature? Paul Schrader’s latest, the intentionally provocative but surprisingly gentle (for a Paul Schrader movie) Master Gardener, is not a film that lives or dies by what you know going into it, but, as is the case with most of his offerings, I’d advise you to not look up more than your local showtimes. […]

Investigating the death of a utopian vision coalesces with a survey of a “developing” dystopian hellscape in Museum of the Revolution, the sprawling, meditative effort from filmmaker, researcher and educator Srđan Keča. Through a series of charming vignettes that are nonetheless thick with human despair (and radical joy in the face of it), Keča’s documentary examines the crumbling remains of the titular edifice in the otherwise rapidly evolving city of Belgrade, Serbia. Construction of the building originally commenced in 1961, and the never-formally-erected Museum of the Revolution was conceived as a grand tribute to then-socialist Yugoslavia. Yet the project was […]

The delicate coming-of-age process is curbed by one family’s struggle with a so-called “crisis” in Stay Awake, writer-director Jamie Sisley’s feature debut. Of course, the crisis at hand is the opioid epidemic, and the afflicted party is a tight-knit family living in a small Virginia town. Michelle (Chrissy Metz, best known for her role on NBC’s This Is Us) is a single mother who undeniably loves her two sons Ethan (Wyatt Oleff) and Derek (Fin Argus). But unfaltering devotion on its own cannot keep Michelle sober, particularly when her doctor keeps refilling her highly-addictive prescription. Most nights, the brothers find themselves desperately […]