Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit play two new mothers from very different backgrounds in the Spanish director’s latest study in female interiority.
Film
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Andres Serrano’s Sensationalistic Flop About January 6
Insurrection is a blunt effort by an artist to find a sensational edge to a national tragedy.
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An Art Film Romance Takes a Rare Transcendentalist View
Using magical realism and never taking the expected approach, Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze asks viewers to take more notice of the world around them.
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On Camouflage and Control in The Velvet Queen
Rather than celebrate intrepid man capturing, and controlling, the magic of “nature,” the film focuses more on how nature watches us.
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A Return to The Matrix Explores Binary Thinking
With The Matrix Resurrections, writer/director Lana Wachowski critically examines how our understanding of gender and identity has changed since the original trilogy.
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A Strange Hallucination Plagues Tilda Swinton in Memoria
The newest feature from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a masterpiece of magical realism, and Hyperallergic’s #1 film of 2021.
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The Gleeful Blasphemy and Queer Nun Romance of Benedetta
Beneath the explicit sex and violence of the latest film from Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven are thoughtful challenges about gender roles and institutional religion.
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Bruno Dumont’s France Is a Cogent, if Convoluted, Critique of Celebrity Culture
This may not be a great film, but its narrative and tonal weaknesses throw into relief just how strong Léa Seydoux is as its thumping heart.
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Denzel Washington Stars in a New Black-and-White Macbeth
Working for the first time without his brother Ethan, Coen’s film adaptation, featuring Denzel Washington as Macbeth, embraces the text with unusual faithfulness.
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Exploring the Baffling Popularity of Kenny G
Penny Lane’s Listening to Kenny G finds fascinating layers to the cult of the smooth jazz icon.
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The New West Side Story Brings the Show’s Father Issues to the Fore
Director Steven Spielberg, long fixated on absent dads, interrogates this theme and other issues of patriarchy and gender roles in his cinematic take on the classic show.
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Yugoslavian Monuments Deliver a Message from Two Billion Years in the Future
The only film directed by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson before his death in 2018, Last and First Men is an eerie combination of sci-fi and documentary.