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, 2025Spike 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