William Repass

Like the celebrated fictions of its subject, Mariano Llinás’s Life of Jorge Luis Borges is a work of many dimensions.

If Federico Fellini’s Satyricon treats the ancient Romans as ultimately unknowable beings inhabiting the alien planet of antiquity, La Gradiva finds in them a familiar pathos.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Serpent’s Path, a remake of the director’s own film from 1998, suffers from being at once too similar to the original and too distinct in a number of crucial respects.

Throughout, Andrius Blaževičius reaffirms the power of film as art to comment on the images and stories under which we try to bury reality.

The Kidnapping of Arabella stages a tug of war between Hollywood’s dream factory and Italian neorealism, and the latter appears to have the final say.

The influence of Brecht and Godard is plain to see, but any distancing effect is counterbalanced by Radu Jude’s earthy black humor and especially by the main character, who gives the film its strong emotional core.

With one foot planted in documentary exposé and the other in coming-of-age drama, the film falls short of satisfying the demands of either genre.

Igor Bezinović plays up the farcical side of history in Fiume o Morte!, his innovative docudrama retelling of Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short-lived occupation of Rijeka, Croatia, in 1920.

For all its empathy, Late Shift upholds the dubious virtue of self-sacrifice that underpins the Protestant work ethic.

By forcing us to identify with its largely comatose protagonist, By Design arouses resentment in order to shake us out of torpor.