Lawrence Garcia

Because of Kapadia’s collage-like approach, A Night Of Knowing Nothing occasionally feels loose and shapeless. But there is a discernible trajectory here.

Self-reflexiveness is no guarantee of value in a documentary, and Futura works perfectly well as cinematic reportage. Still, the film does at times feel slack and arbitrary—a bit like a census that no one could argue is unimportant but which nonetheless has the feel of a box-ticking exercise.

Ultimately, Jockey’s most compelling elements lie in the margins. Its major dramatic moments fall flat next to peripheral, off-hand details.

Hamaguchi’s deliberate disruptions of narrative flow are not crude storytelling gestures so much as attempts to create epiphanic moments out of time, where the rift between imagination and reality ceases to exist—at least until the wheel of fortune turns round once more.

Her Socialist Smile develops, in other words, a kind of ethics of the image. Gianvito is not, of course, suggesting that we should somehow give up our senses—only that, whatever the technology or medium we engage with, it is our responsibility to keep our minds from becoming what Keller called “automatic machines.”

An unassuming but richly suggestive portrait of a lonely vacationer.

In the end, Summer Of 85 is about the idea of romance more than it is an actual romance, and on that level it succeeds almost too well, leaving one wishing for something more substantial.

More conceptual than intuitive, Tragic Jungle offers the problem without the passion: a journey into the heart of darkness without the thrill of the unknown.

All Light, Everywhere is about both making and questioning connections, but by the end, its methods feel not so much productively protean as frustratingly noncommittal.

If nothing else, New Order demonstrates that the line that separates festival-lauded arthouse films from crass exploitation fare can be very thin indeed.