Walking out of László Nemes’ Sunset, I was gripped by the same stupefaction I had felt upon first seeing such films as The Dreamed Path or Post Tenebras Lux: though unable to make full sense of the experience or form a definite judgement, I was pretty sure I had just witnessed something genuinely great. This impression has only grown stronger since. In Sunset, Nemes employs a formal strategy very similar to the one from Son of Saul, stringing together a series of propulsive and staggeringly complex handheld shots that stick close to the protagonist at all times, while the intricate […]

“You failed the living for the dead,” Abraham (Levente Molnar) chides fellow Hungarian Jew Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) in the bowels of Auschwitz-Birkenau in October, 1944. It’s a damning comment, almost a charge of treachery: That is the occasion for the single act of resistance by camp inmates against the occupying Germans. Given recent Russian advances, the Nazis pushed to quickly liquidate not only those who had defied the odds, who had survived unimaginable brutality, epidemics, and freezing temperatures, but also the camp’s naïve newcomers right upon arrival. The latter actually believed they were disrobing for a group shower before […]

László Nemes’s debut feature Son of Saul was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. Taking place over a 36-hour-period at Auschwitz in 1944, the film tells the story of Saul, a member of the “Sonderkommandos,” the Jews forced to handle the dead bodies in the crematorium. When Saul sees the body of a boy he believes to be his son, he goes on an impossible mission to try to save the body from the flames and find a rabbi who can recite the Kaddish to give the boy a proper burial. Saul risks everything and stops at nothing, […]

Cannes by Aaron Hillis The same way New Yorkers love to bitch about living in what they also proclaim to be the world’s greatest city, the Cannes-accredited can spend nearly two weeks in the south of France watching nothing but prestigiously vetted films and have the nerve to call it a “so-so year.” But if that was a too-common sigh, it’s partly because the festival’s main competition had few unanimous hits, which is neither unusual nor taking stock of the parallel pleasures within the Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, or out-of-competition premieres of innovative multiplex fare […]