Hlynur Pálmason
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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]
by Ritesh Mehta on May 23, 2025 -
Cannes 2025: Highest 2 Lowest, Die My Love, The Love That Remains
Spike Lee’s maligned 2013 update of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture, Oldboy, did little to inspire confidence in his latest reimagining of an Asian classic, this time relocating Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) to DUMBO in Brooklyn. Given a very Spike title of Highest 2 Lowest, the Denzel Washington vehicle is expectedly brimming with the director’s signature expressive filmmaking—wildly cubist jump cut coverage within establishing shots, double-take character greetings and spontaneous shifts into saturated 16mm footage of New York abound—and tends to feel more like another excuse to create a cinematic love letter to his hometown and the Black […]
by Blake Williams on May 23, 2025 -
Trailer Watch: Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland
Watch the trailer for Godland, the third feature from Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason. The film takes place during the late 19th century and follows a young Danish priest as he embarks on a grueling journey through the harsh yet stunning landscape of Iceland to establish a church and photograph the inhabitants of the then-remote Danish territory. In his dispatch out of Cannes last year, Blake Williams expands on the film’s sumptuous visuals and the film’s (albeit fictitious) historical reference: “The film is shot on 35mm and lets you know it by adopting what appears to have been an extremely hands-off […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 17, 2023 -
Cannes 2022: Godland, Pacifiction
Day 10 is winding down, and it’s become quite clear that, as was the case for the Berlinale last February, this year’s Cannes is a significant regression after a 2021 edition that overflowed with a pre-pandemic backlog. So many of the films I’ve seen, produced and completed (if not completely developed) in the midst of COVID-era constraints, have felt smaller, cheaper, cruder than what I’ve encountered here in editions past—not a judgment per se, of course, but a new, ill-fitted look from a festival that so pointedly touts its eventitude: the spectacle, the glamor, the scope of its pet auteur’s […]
by Blake Williams on May 26, 2022 -
Fighting Eventfulness Deficit at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival
Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]
by Steve Dollar on May 1, 2018
