Andreas Fontana’s exquisite, quietly dazzling feature Azor answers a question we didn’t know we had: how to make a mystery—a thriller, even—set in the world of private banking. Partly: it’s about the arrival of a Swiss banker, Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), in early 1980s Buenos Aires, when Argentina is still in the grip of dictatorship. De Wiel is there to take on the wealthy (and suspicious) clients of a colleague, Keys, who has disappeared, leaving a flamboyant reputation. Often accompanied by his wife, Inès (Stéphanie Cléau), he’s left to navigate the already murky areas of hush-hush finance under the […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 10, 2021Kwol Min-pyo and Seo Han-sol’s Short Vacation is a graduate thesis film, a side benefit of which is not needing two opening minutes for production company logos but instead being able to jump right into a trim, conflict-free 79 minutes. Four South Korean middle school girls—three long-time friends, the fourth a new-in-town addition to their group—take a long train trip to photograph the rural end of the railroad line. Their photography club teacher has handed out disposable 35mm cameras with the summer vacation assignment to photograph “the end of the world,” however they’d like to interpret that. Taking the train a few […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 29, 2021