A mid-sized family gathers on the anniversary of the death of one of their own. The eldest son, we come to learn, passed away by drowning years before, having accidentally sacrificed himself while rescuing a friend. There’s ample tenderness and loveliness all throughout this tranquil drama, in shots of the family preparing food and reminiscing about years past, in Kore-eda’s exquisitely unembellished shooting style, but a moment I particularly like is when the aging mother confesses, with some satisfaction in…
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Great Freedom 2021
Thoroughly absorbing and beautifully wrought historical drama starring the ever rising Franz Rogowski, whose frail and taciturn performance (as a repeatedly imprisoned gay man in post WWII Germany) suggests great depths of anguished interiority. I’m amazed by the volumes of emotion he can suggest through the smallest of bodily gestures. The sparseness of the score – a mournful lone horn that plays only every so often – is also perfectly haunting.
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Residue 2020
A woozy, intimate, impressionistic debut, and a great one at that. The story is about Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu), a young filmmaker who returns from LA to his childhood neighborhood in Washington D.C. to work on a script. When he gets there, he’s troubled and disoriented by the gentrification he finds is revamping the streets on which he made the memories of his youth, and by the gun violence and drug use/dealing for which some of his old friends are doing serious…
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Friends and Strangers 2021
Who knew Australian mumblecore was even a thing, let alone that it’s this enchanting? The milieu and deceptively airy surface might evoke Rohmer, but the awkward struggles to communicate amongst self-absorbed millennials are more like something out of a Bujalski film than an eloquent Rohmerian gabfest. That said, the unique rhythm and sense of place, the latter established through frequently off-kilter shots of Sydney’s cityscape and sunny coastline, are all Vaughan’s own, and a tremendous delight.
