Laura Citarella’s new film, “Trenque Lauquen,” casts an ambitious net over its vague and beguiling subjects, formulating into a ubiquitous mystery swelling with lush superabundance. Though its runtime is over 4 hours, it is broken up into 2 separate films, giving those weary of such a time commitment a more welcoming way to watch the film in its entirety. It is one of maybe half a dozen films I have given 5 stars to in 2023 and coincidentally, the 2nd…

After Orson Welles finished shooting “Touch of Evil,” he spent a few months editing a rough cut and left it to Universal Studios, resulting in re-shoots he did not direct and a re-cut he did not approve. As a result, Welles wrote the now-famous 58-page memo to Universal’s head of production. The memo meticulously goes through the film shot by shot, scene by scene, suggesting changes aligned with Welles’s vision and improvements upon the film, most of which went unaltered.

Mortality affects us all in profound ways and is the one inevitability we all share. It is invariably a shared experience we all connect with on some emotional level, and a communal exchange that most of us associate as one of the connective threads to the human condition. Michael Haneke, the Austrian auteur whose films give many of us pause and possibly unwanted reflection through his introspective and subversive style of filmmaking, delivers “Amour,” an insightful and compassionate love story…

Similar to the old boxing posters at the turn of the century, the film presents us with an alluring promise – “there will be blood,” by pitting two combatants against one another in a gladiatorial spectacle of man’s unrelenting drive toward dominance. Capitalism and Christianity, the two major building blocks of colonial American history, are juxtaposed forces, each represented by their corresponding, unforgettable, and formidable adversaries. Paul Thomas Anderson conjures a sweeping cinematic collision of these two forces in his…

Inspired by early photographs taken in Iceland, which tell a story of historical fiction, Godland serves as a palette upon which colonial rule and religious dominance were commonly inflicted. Depicted through its precise use of technicality, this remarkable and highly POV experience involves most of what we observe through the eyes of a Lutheran priest and the lens of his camera, which inadvertently become one and the same, creating a metaphorically and symbolically expressive poetry.