Reflection
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Unsparing and Risky Visions: The 2022 First Look Festival
Although its current edition overlaps the waning days of industry monolith SXSW, the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual international showcase First Look originally really was the first look. A scarce few days into the new year, New Yorkers had the opportunity to sample stateside premieres of often boundary-fuzzing selections from the global festival circuit, kicking off the next round of the same even ahead of Sundance, which it could hardly resemble less. The timing has shifted since the festival’s launch in 2011, under now-New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim, but if anything the mission has become more […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 18, 2022 -
Venice Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Reflection and Captain Volkonogov Escaped
In a politically loaded gesture, the Venice Film Festival programmed the premieres of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Reflection and Captain Volkonogov Escaped by Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov on consecutive days. The former Ukrainian and the latter Russian, both these competition entries contain significant scenes of torture by Russian officers and there’s no misreading the films’ implied message. Actually, in the case of Reflection, you can hardly speak of implying – films don’t get much blunter. There’s little room for subtlety in the tableau aesthetic that Vasyanovych has now used, with minimal variation, in at least three successive features. Always working as […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 10, 2021
