'...Hailing from Iran, Mehrdad Oskouei’s Starless Dreams actually played T/F in 2016, when it won the festival's True Vision Award (though it's only become available outside festivals this year). At first glance, it may not be evident how the film, set in the confines of a female juvenile detention center in Tehran, could explore the possibilities of nonfiction cinema. Indeed, there isn't an immediately recognizable formal rupture, no metatextual “hook,” as it were. Indeed, Oskouei’s dominant formal technique is the…

Capsule for InRO's TIFF Coverage:

Awarded the “Signs of Life” program’s top prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Carlo de los Santos Arias‘s Cocote moves from a wealthy estate in Santo Domingo to the town of Oviedo, using a personal tale of revenge to examine political, religious, and cultural tensions in the Dominican Republic. The film follows Alberto (Vicente Santos), an evangelical Christian who returns to his hometown after receiving news of his father’s murder. Although Alberto intends only…

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…