Now, granted, there are today perfectly valid and reasonable radical arguments against, I’m told, the quest to steer homosexuality into the same narrow social constructs that apparently define heterosexuality. If the anime series’s finale was a psychological breakthrough, End of Evangelion is the relapse, an implosion of self-annihilating revulsion and anger rendered in cosmic terms. But like many historic events, the context tends to yield to the historical gravitas of the moment that was only waiting to arrive. Almost no archival footage exists, which gives Kate Davis and David Heilbroner's documentary feature Stonewall Uprising the frustrating air of an oral history lesson. Based on screenwriter Isa Mazzei’s own experiences as a cam model, the film is neither plainly sex positive nor outright cautionary in its depiction of Alice (Madeline Brewer), an up-and-coming streamer whose account is hacked and stolen by someone appearing to be her doppelgänger. The police, called against Renesha’s consent, likewise do nothing to bring her attacker to justice. Both films, part of the festival’s Tiger Competition, bask in philosophical and erotic consequences of illness. As viewers, we’re welcome to consider the persistent motif of walls collapsing, subterfuges dissolving, and rugs being pulled out from still more rugs. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. This is expressed perhaps a bit too literally in a scene that finds Michelangelo wandering in a quasi-fugue state through early-morning Rome, observing (or perhaps hallucinating) his own David sculpture at a crossroads, flanked in the background by a publicly hanged man dangling from the battlements of a nearby fortress. From the outset, Stonewall Uprising diverges quite a bit from Before Stonewall in the sense that, for its narrative to fully work, it has to begin by depicting gay life at rock bottom. The book’s documents are organized into three … Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This literalizes the impression of Ray and Alice struggling to navigate an internal maze of manners. Watch Chapter 1 of Stonewall Uprising. These cookies do not store any personal information. We’re spotlighting our favorite movies currently streaming on Hulu. Strip away the Art Deco glory of its towering cityscapes and factories and the synchronized movements of those who move through those environments and what’s even left? Derek Smith, In 1922, Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) initially scans as a broadly brutish characterization given by an actor looking to disrupt his handsomely aloof image, following a cinematic tradition of expressively filthy, monosyllabic and flamboyantly antisocial characters such as Daniel Plainview and Karl Childers. All rights reserved. But even if the film’s depiction of Billie’s story feels straightforward, Parks finds some breathless surprise in the revelation of a pair of twists, each centering on betrayals that illustrate the increased instability of Billie’s world once the Feds fixate on her. Unspeakable words, useless words. Terms of Use | Teague beautifully builds to the carnage, allowing us to feel sympathy for Cujo even as he devolves into a monster, emphasizing the heavy heat of the dog’s body as it grows deranged by disease, and, later, the piercing sun as it bakes a mother and son trapped by Cujo in their broken-down car. With the help of his childhood friend, Lucas (Joel Edgerton), Alton’s father, Roy (Michael Shannon), has kidnapped the child from captivity at a compound run by a Branch Davidian-like cult that once counted Roy as a member. Living in Tehran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s reign and during Iran’s long war with Iraq, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) feels the world closing in on her, a suffocation that comes to feel almost tactile through the specificity with which Anvari details her day to day. Ballard about George Lucas’s Star Wars in a 1977 piece for Time Out. She explains that when the plant gets sick it communicates to the others, by air or roots, to let them know that there’s an infection nearby. It was an era where self-actualization was absurd, where the only resistance options were through sheer dissociation. Pop music and tech culture has caused invisible barriers to insulate people in Queena Li’s Bipolar. When the bonds between the Abbotts are tested by the external threat of the alien invaders, the viscerally physical ways in which they protect each other from harm are powerful, and it becomes clear that these characters have had to learn different and perhaps more subtle methods of communication due to the circumstances in which they’ve found themselves. But it isn’t long after she returns home to her doting parents, Michelle and John (Katherine Heigl and Harry Connick Jr.), that her intrusive thoughts are making their presence felt again. For, like any great monster movie, this isn’t a film strictly about a monster—or, for that matter, the monstrous countries that spawned it—but about something else: the significance of sustenance. Fernando Croce. Bowen, The Invitation filters each sinister development through Will’s (Logan Marshall-Green) unreliable perspective, to the point that one friend’s failure to turn up at a lavish dinner, or another’s precipitous departure, appear as if submerged, changing with each shift in the emotional current. As the film industry at large continues to fret over its survival, this festival known for its focus on cutting-edge media art has slotted into its program a number of films conspicuously concerned with our digital lives and people trying to survive in a fractured world. Too often, though, the film introduces and develops these characters through montages or silent glances as Billie sings, and her own discomfited vagueness about what she wants from each of these relationships seeps too far into the depiction of them. Recently made redundant from their jobs at a furniture store, where they mostly sat on a display sofa and reminisced about old times, Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) decide to leave their Midwestern town for the first time ever, paying a visit to the Florida party resort of Vista Del Mar in an effort to step out of their comfort zone and recapture the carefree spirit of their youth. Which is why the coda to Stonewall Uprising, otherwise confined to its specific moment in the timeline of gay American history, is so compelling and, frankly, overpowers the riot itself. ", The film methodically provides historical context for the events, supplying ample evidence of the discrimination against gays and lesbians at the time. Chuck Bowen, In writer-director Remi Weekes’s debut feature, His House, the unresolved trauma that strips away at an immigrant family’s defenses is horrifyingly manifested when they finally move into their designated low-income housing, and struggle to navigate a foreign culture that insists on assimilation. For every eviscerated remake or toothless throwback, there’s a startlingly fresh take on the genre’s most time-honored tropes; for every milquetoast PG-13 compromise, there’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners attempt to push the envelope on what we can honestly say about ourselves. Tasjan! Cast: Brittany S. Hall, Will Brill, Gail Bean, Drew Fuller Director: Shatara Michelle Ford Screenwriter: Shatara Michelle Ford Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 82 min Rating: NR Year: 2019. While both clans see the papacy primarily as a seat of worldly power rather than holy duty, Konchalovsky portrays the Medicis in particular as a cynical, corrupt network of aristocrats that one could easily compare to mobsters—or, with only a bit more extrapolation, to capitalists. Cast: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo, Jamie Dornan, Damon Wayans Jr., Michael Hitchcock, Kwame Patterson, Reyn Doi, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Vanessa Bayer, Fortune Feimster, Rose Abdoo, Phyllis Smith Director: Josh Greenbaum Screenwriter: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo Distributor: Lionsgate Running Time: 107 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2021. Horror films remain perennially popular, despite periodic (and always exaggerated) rumors of their demise, even in the face of steadily declining ticket sales and desperately shifting models of distribution. Fortunately, the PBS documentary Stonewall Uprising came to my attention shortly thereafter. The editing fuses multiple timelines while parodying the internet-surfing ADD of the modern world, propelling the narrative forward while fostering a tone of cheeky debauchment. Beneath its show of smoke and mirrors, mercenary babes, and treacherous holograms, Total Recall is a story about a man who must choose between two possible, contradictory realities. But it’s easy to excuse the film for going for the happy ending, considering how balanced it’s been up to this point, crafting characters that aren’t defined solely by silliness or sentimentality. The characters here always seem to know each other’s gossip, and they all seem to live most fully in the world of social media. Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), Holiday’s enemy and the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is a racist caricature—as he very much appears to have been in real life—who announces to his team, “This jazz music is the devil’s work. Having predictably learned nothing from their travails, the train’s passengers quickly assume the flawed social structure of the first world that’s recently ended, with the entitled haves exploiting the enraged have-nots. Bowen, The Guest is carried by an intense and surprising mood of erotic melancholia. Nick Prigge, Writer-director Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy. Bowen, A Quiet Place, like John Carpenter’s The Thing before it, contributes a strikingly original monster to the genre of horror films focused exclusively on surviving an invasive threat. And the carnage, when it arrives, is staged with an aura of guttural bitterness that refuses to give gore-hounds their jollies, elaborating, instead, on the desolation of the characters committing the acts. For an event of such seismic social importance in the modern era, the 1969 Stonewall riots went shockingly undocumented. A talking crab with the voice of Morgan Freeman is a briefly amusing curveball, though cheekily parodying the actor’s baritone voiceover wisdom is surely now even more hackneyed than deploying it sincerely. Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil. The basic facts are well known: The Stonewall, a seedy, Mafia-owned gay bar in the heart of Greenwich Village, was raided by police June 28, 1969. The film’s ending does seem to conflict sharply with its “you can’t go back” message, with the sudden appearance of special effects signaling an abandonment of the emotional and narrative verisimilitude exhibited so far. Combined with the ominous way in which her attacker’s minimalist apartment is lit, these effects bend Test Pattern toward psychological horror, externalizing Renesha’s emotions through expressionistic film technique. Sometimes she moves unnoticed through sequences as though a ghost, and as she crosses Tibet, she becomes increasingly alienated from her own self; everything from her outlook on the future to her gender expression to responses to the behavior of men is constantly shifting. One night their video chat is intruded on by several of their classmates—along with a pictureless mystery caller. The film, based on true events that rocked Holland in 2005, is a welcome reminder that the boundaries between wanting and not wanting are often unclear, that sexual desire’s tacit agreements are generally bound to be misunderstood by systems built on a logic of rationality. Bowen, Scott Wilson’s deliciously hammy presence as the American captain in the opening scene indicates that Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is, in the broadest sense, a politically charged diatribe against both American and Korean political cover-up machinations of misinformation. And to achieve this, Ford splices two genres that are usually thought of as mutually exclusive, punctuating the detachment of realist drama with the expressionism of psychological horror. Parents need to know that Stonewall Outloud is a short (32 minute) documentary commemorating the people and events of June 28, 1969, when patrons of The Stonewall Inn, a Manhattan gay bar, resisted arrest and fought back against the New York City Police Department. There have been several significant films documenting the struggle for gay civil rights, including "Before Stonewall" and "After Stonewall." Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community is one of the first visual representations of queer identity in American history.Directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, the documentary film was produced in 1984 to draw on the personal, little-known chapters of the LGBTQ+ community prior to the 1969 riots. THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER is a registered trademark of The Hollywood Reporter, LLC. Of course, Wiig’s beloved Saturday Night Live tenure suggests that she doesn’t need a fully developed character to score laughs, and even Bridesmaids is essentially a parade of stock figures. With the notable exception of the first scene, which shows the buildup to her sexual assault by another white man (Drew Fuller), the first third of the film adopts the objective camerawork of a realist drama, following the characters at a slight remove as their relationship unfolds in linear time. At the same time, the genre manages to find fresh and powerful metaphors for where we’re at as a society and how we endure fractious, fearful times. It was an era where self-actualization was absurd, where the only … Best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, the film never feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends. One person found this helpful An oddball vision for sure, King Car is also crass, particularly as it gets into a subplot about a city being regenerated through people’s renewed interest in nature, in a gesture toward green new deal politics that amounts to empty window dressing. We’re given little backstory about Dou’s protagonist, whose name even eludes us. There’s a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to all of this, but the purpose isn’t merely to sensationalize; there are very real, very relevant contemporary anxieties coursing through this story, lending the horror a provocative charge. And the film embodies that stance, as in a scene where a latex gloves-wearing female officer empties a bag belonging to one man and announces its contents—dildos, poppers, anal beads, baggies of drugs—with the clinical disaffection of Martha Rosler in Semiotics of the Kitchen. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia–run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. The book’s central conceit—of a rabid Saint Bernard as a metaphor for unchecked addiction—is softened by narrative trimming, but the chaos, violation, and sheer velocity of King’s vision are still allowed to break through. The interrogation of this phenomenon—and the conflicting pressures these agents face from the communities that care about them and from the colleagues who plainly do not—is the film’s most compelling subplot. Cropping up whenever she’s beset by an unpleasant visual or auditory hallucination, it’s supposed to represent her working through a list of crucial reality checks, a practice recommended by her hilariously named therapist, Dr. Elyn Pangloss (Enuka Okuma). Though the second film, most commonly known in America as The Road Warrior, is often cited as the masterpiece of the series, the original Mad Max is still the most ferocious and subversive. Despite the main character’s desperation to return to a kind of primal state, the digital, hyper-real landscape of the film feels unintentionally at odds with that quest, that Li’s imagined poetry, the stuff of the modern world, is something that Dou’s character must overcome in order to find something “real.”, An image from Renata Pinheiro’s King Kar. Fear of Rain disposes of subtlety as if it were a poison. ... Load More Features Movie Reviews Presented by Rotten Tomatoes. Get a Retro Movie. Rob Humanick. Cast: Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Leslie Jordan, Miss Lawrence, Adriane Lenox, Natasha Lyonne, Rob Morgan, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Evan Ross, Tyler James Williams, Tone Bell, Blake DeLong, Dana Gourrier, Melvin Gregg, Erik LaRay Harvey, Ray Shell Director: Lee Daniels Screenwriter: Suzan-Lori Parks Distributor: Hulu Running Time: 120 min Rating: NR Year: 2021. But here, the characters aren’t recordings, and they’re at least partially conscious of their imprisonment, consigned to live out the same events in perpetuity. Both Garcia and Leyendekker’s films revel in the confusion of fact with fiction, enactment and re-enactment, metaphorical dialogue and theoretical diatribe. “She looks like a million bucks, but she feels like nothing,” one of Billie’s closest confidantes (Miss Lawrence) explains, and Day captures that dichotomy with an emotional clarity that the The United States vs. Billie Holiday sometimes lacks elsewhere. The film’s video diary aesthetic quickly breaks into a series of melancholy musings as Mourad starts to speak directly to the camera, and eventually trembles naked on the floor in a kind of performance art. Here, though, we get the sense that Wiig and Mumolo have a bit too much affection for their characters, preventing them from bringing out any of the hidden, more uncomfortable vulnerabilities that might have resulted in richer comedy. But the latter cars are lit in expressionistically beautiful club-rave rainbow colors that reflect the escalating social privilege of a lost generation. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. The heartbreaking fall from sanity experienced by the trio of naïve filmmakers preys with ecstatic precision on our most instinctive fears, building to a rousing crescendo of primordial terror that’s arguably unrivaled by anything the genre has seen before or since. And just like those other revolutionary moments in American history, the riots now have a well-meaning, efficacious, but inoffensively classroom-ready set of talking heads to call their own. Selim Mourad also plays with ideas around the diseased queer body by weaving divergent visual grammars in Agate Mousse, channeling Guillaume Dustan’s fearless indecency, Hervé Guibert’s radical vulnerability, and Joaquim Pinto’s diaristic essayism. Eden slashes her wrists in the kitchen sink, the sounds of children playing emanate from the empty yard, inane talk of the Internet’s funny cats and penguins becomes white noise against Will’s screaming: The question of whether or not to trust his sense of foreboding is perhaps not so open as director Karyn Kusama and company might wish, but against the terrors of continuing on after losing a child, the issue of narrative suspense is almost immaterial. Clashing awkwardly with what could’ve been a gentle, low-stakes story about friendship and aging, this thriller subplot feels weirdly tacked on. Ever since audiences ran screaming from the premiere of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 short black-and-white silent documentary Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the histories of filmgoing and horror have been inextricably intertwined. Bowen, No genre is better at processing our contemporary anxieties than horror, and perhaps no film has more fully captured the modern paranoia of living under constant surveillance by our own technology than Stephen Susco’s Unfriended: Dark Web. EMAIL ME. A number of notable films at IFFR this year are concerned with our digital lives and people trying to survive in a fractured world.
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