In the early months of 2003, a film that had been building buzz on the festival circuit the year before began to make its way to American arthouses. A story of twentysomethings caught up in petty crime and the punishment of perpetual restlessness — and blessed with the English title …
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There’s nothing like starting a movie with a running gag, and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl kicks off with a beauty. A young woman Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving home late at night. She notices something in the road. It’s a body. Not only that — Shula recognizes …
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It’s a sight familiar to anyone who’s been nurtured on a steady diet of international films: Children are sitting in a classroom, getting lectured by an irate teacher. The conversations are in Farsi, which suggests we’re somewhere on the outskirts of Tehran. The fact that one of the students is …
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Beauty, we’re told, is in the eye of the beholder. There are some types of beauty that go beyond the subjective, however — the kind that stops traffic, turns modest men into Tex-Avery-style wolves and have entire feature films centered around them. This is the category that the title character …
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It’s the laugh that gets you. Roughly halfway through Armand, the debut feature from Norwegian filmmaker Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, we watch someone fall apart. A mother has been called into a parent-teacher conference. Her name is Elisabeth, she’s an actor of some renown, and is now largely associated with a …
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And a pussycat shall lead them! Flow, the animated film that’s Latvia’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, kicks off with a beautiful moment of tranquility: A small, black feline, staring wide-eyed at itself in a rippling puddle. It’s somewhere in a forest, surrounded by foliage, and the ambient …
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“The city takes time away from you,” an unseen voice says, near the beginning of Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. “You’d better get used to impermanence.” The city in question is Mumbai, which an opening montage presents as a monsoon-season metropolis filled with clashing dialects, crushes …
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Andrea Arnold’s Bird starts off with what might feel like a wee bit of a feint: A 12-year-old named Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is filming a flock of seabirds on her phone. They’re gliding high above the beaches in the British county of Kent, near the bunker-like apartment building where Bailey …
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A rich guy purchases the services of a sex worker for a one-week “girlfriend experience,” which turns into something even better than the real thing — does this sound familiar? Rewind back to 1990, and you can see how, given the right combination of casting, sitcom-level humor and materialistic wish …
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The first big laugh in Rumours hits before the opening credits have even finished rolling: “The producers would like to thank the G7 leaders for their support and consultation during the making of this movie.” As political bloggers, chronic doomscrollers and any conspiracy theorist with access to the internet will …
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