By Clara Miranda Scherffig The Banshees of Inisherin is a pessimistic fable told in the way of a black comedy-drama. In the style of Martin McDonagh’s previous efforts, the film exists as a self-contained, odd universe that aptly plays out on an island, the fictional Inisherin on the West coast of Ireland. It’s 1923 and…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig In one of the first sequences of The Origin of Evil, rows of anchovies are shown being packaged in plastic on an assembly line. Later on, the image of dead fish crammed in an oily box will cease to embody the family intrigue at the centre of the plot and become,…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig More than just a key to a healthy life, eating can be a ritual of joy. The lack of food is generally associated with violence, and its excess is often regarded as obscene. This is, in part, the premise of The Whale, another installment in Darren Aronofsky’s career-long study about the…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig There is certainly fertile ground for a film in the spy-riddled landscape between Cuba and Miami during the early ’90s. Think of the Pulitzer-winning photograph of six-year-old Elián González being forcibly seized by armed soldiers, and you have the setting for Olivier Assayas’ new film. Wasp Network narrates the heyday of…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig In his first film set in contemporary Chile, Pablo Larraìn relays a story of wicked energy within a system that doesn’t recognize itself as such anymore. In contrast with the director’s previous films, Chilean society in Ema is not a character per se, but a platform upon which one can exercise…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig It is always surprising how many filmmakers deploy the narrative device of a pregnancy in order to explore the emotional and social depths of male characters. This is the case in Sole, the first feature by Italian Carlo Sironi. Ermanno (Claudio Segaluscio) is a young man who spends his time engaged…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig Marriage Story opens with a close up of Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) with her neck wrapped in a black turtleneck and her blond hair cut short. She is on a stage, being directed by Charlie (Adam Driver), her close collaborator, as well as her husband. Like the overlap between the protagonists’ professional…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig Many viewers “only” know Steve Bannon as the bad-skinned evil plotter behind Donald Trump: a racist, a fascist, an occasional movie producer, a failed media mogul—in other words, not exactly a cinephile. Errol Morris’ documentary about Bannon, American Dharma, includes excerpts of classic American films picked by Bannon to illustrate his…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig Film festivals provide an opportunity to rethink the way we exercise critical power, for sometimes we are incapable of deciphering how we truly feel about a film while still sitting in the theatre. Upon initial viewing, the first English-language feature by French director Jacques Audiard—a Western of European provenance (it was…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig In the era of the self and the ubiquity of digital images, the print billboard has been perhaps replaced by the multiscreen. Both types of visual support make brief appearances in Bradley’s Cooper remake of A Star is Born, and yet—just like the film—both elements stay on the surface instead of…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig It seems that Wim Wenders has found his special medium, and, for better or worse, he will keep experimenting with it. After Pina (2011) and Everything Will Be Fine (2015), once again the German director employs 3D to frame his adaptation of a 2012 play by Austrian writer Peter Handke, his…

By Clara Miranda Scherffig Sci-fi is a hospitable genre, as it allows filmmakers to both experiment within and reinforce its outer conventions. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival creatively positions itself within that relationship. Based on Ted Chiang’s short tale “Story of Your Life,” the film employs a voiceover commentary that holds together its major motifs: science and…