By José Teodoro From the start of Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú it seems like a boy’s boy’s boy’s world. In the opening moments three boys bound off a high diving board, followed by a girl whose hesitation is so prolonged the scene ends before we learn whether she follows suit or opts for retreat. We see…

By José Teodoro Among Barry’s most likable attributes is the fact that it barely even needs to be about Barack Obama, whose actual given name is never uttered over the course of the film. Set in August 1981, the loose narrative introduces us to its 20-year-old protagonist just as he arrives in NYC to study…

By José Teodoro Neon Bull begins with a languid lateral pan across widescreen-friendly corral fencing, bulls lazing one atop another spied between the slats. This image is soon followed by that of a plane of parched mud littered with coloured rags and dismembered mannequins. Later we see a woman waxing her pubic hair in the…

By José Teodoro There is no such thing as ambient sunlight in Bleak Street. The sun’s rays descend from high above, diffused by a latticework of electrical cables, metal stairs, frayed tarpaulin, and urban flotsam, or slam down in hard sheets through a grid of tall buildings and concrete canopies. A swaying, phantom-like camera, deepening…

Eternal Damnation: Arturo Ripstein’s Bleak Street By José Teodoro Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). There is no such thing as ambient sunlight in Bleak Street. The sun’s rays descend from high above, diffused by a latticework of electrical cables, metal stairs, frayed tarpaulin, and urban flotsam, or slam down in hard sheets…

By José Teodoro There are in fact multiple elephants in the room in this adaptation of Nicolas Billon’s play: the awkward struggle to cinematize a story designed to generate tension through sustained enclosure in a single location; the repeated deployment of an overarching metaphor to the point of exhaustion; and the showboating of Xavier Dolan…

By José Teodoro The first image of Bastards, a gauzy curtain of nocturnal drizzle, falls on us like a heavy dream—or rather, it drags us under. The rain raineth on a whole lot of eerily beautiful gloom during the wordless, disorienting opening sequence: a solitary older man gazes out a window, seemingly resigned to some…

By José Teodoro Set in early 1942, Australian writer-director Aaron Wilson’s feature debut unfolds entirely in the fecund jungles of Singapore in the midst of the Japanese invasion. Canopy follows a downed Australian airman and a lost Singapore-Chinese resistance fighter as they join forces to tend to their wounds and find their way to safety.…

By José Teodoro Owen Wilson coasts on his familiar faux-innocence and blank cheerfulness as Steve, a weatherman and serial womanizer. He deploys the same seduction speech on every female he seeks to bed, sex-workers included. Zach Galifianakis plays Ben, Steve’s squirrely, unemployable best friend, who seems about two bong hits away from becoming the Hippie…

By José Teodoro The first images are captured from below the murky surface of the Seine, seemingly from the point-of-view of the poor sap who gets drowned by the dunderheaded lover of the film’s unlucky anti-heroine. It makes you wonder whether this workmanlike, mostly faithful revisit of Émile Zola’s brilliantly dreary early novel—the prototype for…

By José Teodoro Amazing is certainly pushing it, but Claudia Sainte-Luce’s debut feature (photographed by Claire Denis’ regular shooter Agnès Godard) has enough craft and intelligence to render its sentimental story about coming out of one’s shell more charming and inventive than one would expect. Set in Guadalajara, the film follows an unlikely product demonstrator…

By José Teodoro The face in question, arresting baby blues set within those weathered, wizened features, belongs to Ed Harris. A curious choice of visage to represent such a concept, to say the least, especially considering the crazed look Harris sports while making his entrance, which is also an exit, as the first of the…

By José Teodoro The murder of Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) remains one of the cinema’s most traumatic turning points in part because it so completely refutes causality. Only the most obtuse (or misogynist) of moral misers could regard the shower murder as any kind of karmic consequence of Marion’s theft from her…

By José Teodoro It begins with hands, a doctor’s hands, pressing gently into the flabby belly of a nervous, middle-aged patient. And again and again, hands reappear—most often those of Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) or of Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch), each caressing the smooth, naked back of Bob Elkin (Murray Head), an ambitious sculptor and…