Capsule for InRO's Venice coverage:

'Gina (Lindsay Burdge), a flight attendant, hooks up with Jérôme (Damien Bonnard), a mustachioed bartender at a Parisian strip-club, after her husband commits suicide (a scene that’s drolly narrated by Anjelica Huston) in Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street. To Gina, Jérôme is a figure of fate, a man with “something in his eye,” as predicted by a fortune-teller—though that “something” turns out to be conjunctivitis, which he passes on to her. As Thirst Street’s title suggests,…

The film opens in a state of suspension, the perfectly "livable" spaces of Hamburg, in the first half, offering Younghee only transitory companionship ("I'm the kind of person who needs to live alone," her friend tells her) and permanent, discombobulating solitude. It's a film perpetually haunted—by what, though? loss? regret? Death itself? A black-clad figure approaches in a wide-shot, asking for the time; after a spontaneous gesture of supplication, the spectre approaches once more; finally, as if summoned by a…

Firmly split on this one, which seems about right given that Nolan is simultaneously over-praised and undervalued (though I consider myself a partisan of his). But there really is no getting past the gulf between its staggering, brilliant conceit—which attempts to do no less than to demonstrate, with increasing temporal and spatial immediacy, the parallel planes upon which a war is fought; to enfold the immediate ground-level experience of those events within a larger historical understanding of one of the…