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Articles by Lawrence Garcia
Nowhere To Lay My Eyes — Hong Sang-soo [Locarno ’26 Review]
Schematically, one could divide Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre into two sets of films: on the one hand, those where the structural play with narrative is upfront and unmissable, explicitly marked with title cards or numbers; and on the other, those where it is more or less submerged, noticeable only if one considers their subtle plays with familiar cinematic grammar. Films of the first sort would include Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), and The Day...
September Afternoon — Nicolaas Schmidt [Locarno ’26 Review]
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a knowing pastiche of one. Smiling families frolic on a beach at the height of summer. Young men and women in bathing suits run by each other flirtatiously. A man in snorkeling gear clowns by the shallows as surfers ride the waves in the background. Somewhere, someone is enjoying an icy popsicle. If the sequence is...
The Suit — Heinz Emigholz [NYFF '24 Review] | In Review Online
Credit: NYFF/Film at Lincoln Center It has now been seven years since Heinz Emigholz, until 2017 mainly known for his semi-silent architecture films, reintroduced language into his cinema with Streetscapes [Dialogue].
Presence — Steven Soderbergh | In Review Online
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended experiments with the same, how can one reasonably impute sentience, let alone sapience, to the movements of the camera? Properly understood, though, the idea is — or anyway should be — of central importance.
Misericordia — Alain Guiraudie [TIFF '24 Review] | In Review Online
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural hometown of Saint-Martial, from which he has been away for some ten years, for the funeral of his former boss. Upon arrival, he briefly reconnects with the man’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), and his son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a childhood friend. For the moment, though, the funeral proceedings take over.
By the Stream — Hong Sang-soo [Locarno '24 Review] | In Review Online
In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform. His argument involved two principal points.
Death Will Come — Christoph Hochhäusler [Locarno '24 Review] | In Review Online
Death Will Come, German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s latest feature (and first French-language production), follows a contract killer, Tez (Sophie Veerbeck), who is hired by an aging crime lord, Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), to find and dispatch the persons responsible for killing one of his couriers. Per the director’s own description, it’s probably his “purest genre work” — and this assessment stands to reason.
The Other Way Around — Jonás Trueba [Cannes '24 Review] | In Review Online
When first introduced at the beginning of Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around, a couple, Ale (Itsaso Ariana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), have already decided to separate after some 15 years of marriage. Although we never learn the precise reasons for the decision, they repeatedly say that it was mutual and that they are on good terms.
Evil Does Not Exist — Ryûsuke Hamaguchi | In Review Online
Evil Does Not Exist is the sort of film one makes after winning an Oscar. Following the massive success of Drive My Car, which has all but guaranteed that his films will continue to play relatively widely, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has taken the opportunity to create an experiment in audience alienation.
About Dry Grasses — Nuri Bilge Ceylan | In Review Online
When first introduced in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest feature, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher, has been in the remote village of Icesu for four years. Posted there for compulsory civil service, he has been looking to leave since the moment he arrived — and by the end of the film, he will do so. Before the school year is out, though, he will first be involved in two overlapping dramas which constitute the bulk of the film’s 197-minute runtime.
All of Us Strangers — Andrew Haigh | In Review Online
Space and time are rendered deliberately unstable in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. The film is anchored in a new, near-empty London high-rise where Adam (Andrew Scott), a middle-aged screenwriter, lives an apparently solitary existence. But its second crucial location is his childhood home in South London, which he takes periodic train rides to over the course of the film.
The Zone of Interest — Jonathan Glazer | In Review Online
The issue at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is one of the oldest in the cinema: how does one represent the unrepresentable? Loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, and set in 1942, the film is centered around the Höss household: a German family who live in a large, two-story house with tasteful, minimal decor, complete with a swimming pool, a greenhouse, and a flourishing garden.
Monster — Hirokazu Kore-eda | In Review Online
With his latest film Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the Japanese director has made the equivalent of three, each one worse and more wrongheaded than the last. The first of the film’s three parts opens promisingly enough, centered on a single mother, Saori (Ando Sakura), who finds out that her son, Minato (Kurokawa Soya), is apparently being verbally and physically abused by his schoolteacher, Mr. Hori (Nagayama Eita).
The Killer — David Fincher | In Review Online
In one of the many gnomic remarks of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “When ‘I raise my arm’, my arm rises.
Past Lives — Celine Song | In Review Online
With Past Lives, director Celine Song has a fine story on her hands — and she knows it. A decade after immigrating with her family from South Korea to Canada, Nora (Greta Lee) finds herself in New York, reconnecting over Skype with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), a childhood friend she once said she’d marry. But when she feels it difficult to sustain the go-nowhere relationship while keeping to her ambitions of making it as a playwright, she breaks things off.
Berlinale23 Archives | In Review Online
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People In Rooms: The Films of Mike Leigh
In the commentary track to Grown-Ups (1980), one of eight television films Mike Leigh made for the BBC, the director remarks that many of his filmmaking decisions flow from asking one basic question: “Is this a man in a room, or a room with a man in it?” His films, which have launched the careers of several great English actors, are almost invariably concerned with the former. But this distinction conveys Leigh’s conception of human behavior is fundamentally relational.
TÁR — Todd Field | In Review Online
TÁR raises plenty of fascinating questions, but Field unfortunately proves more interested in depicting the luridness of their specific context here than he does in exploring them with much substance or daring. The first scene of Todd Field’s TÁR sees its eponymous lead character (Cate Blanchett) in conversation with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (playing himself).
NYFF22 Archives | In Review Online
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