Barrio Triste

BARRIO TRISTE   ***

Stillz

2025

IDEA:  Four poor adolescent boys in Medellín, Colombia run off with a news reporter's camera and spontaneously document their adventures.

BLURB:  Barrio Triste is effectively (and affectively) designed like a rediscovered diary transmission from the past, sent by a group of downtrodden teenagers as visual proof of their existence against a society that renders them lost, invisible. Call it Los Olvidados. The film’s low-resolution video format and first-person perspective revive the once-ubiquitous found-footage subgenre, giving agency to characters who, in the opening minutes, co-opt Stillz’s camera (a TV news camera in the diegesis) to record their lives. Stillz takes full advantage of the aesthetic possibilities of this setup by executing long, winding tracking shots through the streets and along the rooftops of the barrio, mapping a lived geography thick with environmental and sensory texture. What is captured is not just squalor, but play, generosity, and beauty; little girls biking, the protagonist feeding a carrot to a horse, a rainbow peeking faintly through fog above the city. Neorealist observation gradually morphs into mystical intervention as the boys trudge on and night descends. Now, we’re in Dante’s Inferno, complete with a burning car, labyrinthine ruins, and a silhouetted satyr. Even in such baleful moments, Barrio Triste rarely loses a sense of ambient wonder, conjured as much through the woozy, smeary video image as Arca’s score, a malleable blend of electronic dissonance and plaintive piano. All the while, dead pixels seem to multiply on the screen, appearing like stars in the darkness. Maybe they are like the teenagers of Barrio Triste, turning visual absence into presence.

Orlando

ORLANDO   ****

Sally Potter

1993

IDEA:  Instructed by a dying Elizabeth I to never grow old, a nobleman lives for centuries, first as a man and then as a woman, dealing with England's shifting customs and geopolitics.

BLURB:  In a film brimming with the most exquisite sets and costumes (can Sandy Powell do any wrong?), the most sublime effect of Orlando might be Tilda Swinton herself. Her porcelain facial features and fulsome eyes seem to be magically lit from within; whether she’s looking directly at us or not, her visage envelops the frame like some numinous icon we cannot help but be ensorcelled by. Suffice it to say, there could be no better actor to embody an ethereal, gender-fluid immortal who defies time, space, biology, and social order, who tries on human culture as if it were a series of costume changes with nary a perfect fit. Just as nobody can fix Tilda Swinton into any mold, nor can one fix Orlando, whose protean, centuries-spanning process of becoming throws into relief the absurdities and contradictions of the rigid roles foisted upon her by society. As a man, Orlando is expected to be aggressive and commanding, and even he, though ill-suited to these traits, unthinkingly indulges in the privileges of machismo when he claims a woman as his simply because he adores her. Orlando remains the same person as a woman, but is now suddenly forced into immobilizing, elephantine gowns, lectured by pompous men, and stripped of her property rights. Potter’s film exposes gender as a performance constructed differently and arbitrarily across eras and cultures, and the sexed body not as an essentialized form but a surface onto which social mores are attached and reified. This is all conveyed with incredible wit, gemlike editing, a swoon-worthy score, and not a wasted frame. Potter’s storytelling economy is as breathtaking as Orlando’s mad dash through the hedge maze, her pristine sense for color and camera movement as gratifying as a queer hero who lives an eternity, taking all the time they need to define their own freedom.

The Odyssey

THE ODYSSEY   ***

Christopher Nolan

2026

IDEA:  Following the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men go on an arduous journey to return home to an Ithaca in ruins.

BLURB:  With his version of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan whittles the epic poem into one of his favorite stories: the brilliant but morally conflicted man whose work estranges him from his family, and his humanity. The filmmaker’s fixation on this brooding archetype has become as expected as his predilection for nonlinear cross-cutting and cacophonous soundscapes, but what is surprising is how richly it fits into Homer’s text. Nolan’s Odysseus — played by Matt Damon in a register much closer to morose than vainglorious — undergoes a modern reframing as a reluctant, guilt-stricken hero burdened by postwar trauma. His conscience flares in soul-sick visions of Athena and slivered flashbacks to the chaos of the Trojan War (among the places where Nolan’s fractured editing works best), culminating in a stirring, plangent third-act catharsis that recontextualizes the war through Odysseus’s profound shame and regret. As per usual, Nolan wants to ground even the most fantastical of ideas in a sense of realism, so the modern psychology applied to Odysseus is echoed in set pieces and other characters that are brought down to human scale (pointedly, none of the gods appear). In some ways, this feels like a symptom of Nolan’s paucity of visual imagination; he still seems indifferent to the concept of mise en scène, preferring spartan locations and quick, static close-ups of actors over more epic-friendly wide shots composed in depth, and his color palette remains mostly limited to dusky blacks, blues, and browns, with yellow highlights. Yet the aesthetic does end up suiting this grittier, sepulchral Odyssey, particularly in such standout scenes as the invasion of Troy and the visit to Hades, which are given an equally haunting moral weight (and in the latter, a killer monologue from Elliot Page, second only to Anne Hathaway in bringing real theatrical fire to the film). Ludwig Göransson provides a reliably robust, eclectic score, and Nolan’s incessantly loud sound mix, for once, feels well-modulated around his actors. When Odysseus returns home, so does The Odyssey bring home its thesis of how powerful men poison society with self-interest and ignobility, and how easily we enable them. It’s a not-so-subtle lament that rings out a resounding cry in a retelling acutely tailored to our modern times.

Attenberg

ATTENBERG   ***

Athina Rachel Tsangari

2010

IDEA:  Living with her terminally ill father in a small industrial seaside village in Greece, 23-year-old Marina struggles with issues of intimacy and independence. 

BLURB:  Leading from its title — a mispronunciation of the last name of Sir David Attenborough — Attenberg depicts a society in which language and conventional structures fail to adhere. Not only is the figure of symbolic authority, the father, literally on his deathbed, his power is already diminished in the eyes of his daughter Marina (a persuasively guileless and ungainly Ariane Labed), who imagines him without a phallus. Marina is in a developmental limbo where social institutions introduce a radical otherness she’s unable to assimilate. So she regresses to the pre-verbal, anti-social comfort of acting like an animal, or mirroring her friend Bella in a bodily synchrony that forestalls the anxiety of difference. This colorful, confounding dysfunction is often played for droll comedy, but it never yields the kind of shock-jock sadism that sometimes infects the work of Tsangari’s fellow Greek Weird Wave auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (who, ironically, appears in this film as its most normal, affable character). The behavioral perversity and formal austerity that comprise Attenberg are undergirded by empathy for Marina’s clumsy stabs at self-actualization, a process Tsangari analogizes to a wider, Greek national crisis of identity formation. At the same time, for all its quirks, the film mostly hews to the beats of a typical coming-of-age story, including the retrograde implication that maturity is achieved through heterosexual sex. But Tsangari leaves us not with her heroine’s triumphant initiation into adulthood, but with an ominously lingering shot of one of the industrial landscapes that have appeared throughout the film as a sign of stunted growth. The construction continues.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER   ***1/2

Jean-Luc Godard

1967

IDEA:  Housewife and prostitute Juliette goes about her day in a modernizing Parisian banlieue. 

BLURB:  How does one write about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her? It’s a question Godard must have anticipated, considering how much the film is about the limits of language and the inadequacy of words in capturing the complexity of people, feelings, and experiences. The image might not be much better, the auteur mischievously and ironically suggests, whether he’s self-reflexively debating which ones to use in his film or trying to limn a consumer capitalist culture where images are reduced to commodity signs, and people and things are reduced to images. Yet Godard’s own capacity for communication never seems stymied, even when he’s at his most willfully abstruse and audience-antagonistic (a tendency that was about to become much more obnoxious). With Raoul Coutard’s vibrant color cinematography and production design festooned with commercial objects, 2 or 3 Things uses the surfaces of consumer culture to reflect on what they conceal. The film’s digressive, disruptive form resists the efficiency and digestibility of the society it critiques. Godard conveys meaning through oblique vignettes and juxtapositions: an apartment serving simultaneously as a brothel and daycare; prostitutes with airline-branded tote bags on their heads; overloud urban noises and men pulling random quotes from piles of books. There is acid cynicism in the resulting collage of a deranged modernity, but there is also freedom in taking it all apart, in letting the actor-objects shoot back our gaze and muse on the frustrations and desires unsolved by materialism, on granting fashion magazines and groceries existential weight. Maybe, a cup of coffee really can reveal the universe.

Leviticus

LEVITICUS   **1/2

Adrian Chiarella

2026

IDEA:  After being subjected to a religious ritual to cleanse them of their homosexuality, two teenage boys find themselves hunted by an entity that takes the form of the other. 

BLURB:  A recent trend in LGBTQ indie filmmaking has used the horror genre to explore religious bigotry, physicalizing sexual oppression as a deadly supernatural force preying on gay youth in conservative communities (see Almamula and Ganymede, both 2023). While the monsters in those films were more generalized manifestations of homophobia the protagonists had to contend with largely alone, Leviticus adds an intriguing wrinkle to the formula: romance, as both a target for and bulwark against a provincial town’s homophobic Christian dogmas. Chiarella’s central metaphor is blunt but potent, conveying how society weaponizes fear to suppress queer identities, and how in turn queer people internalize that fear so they’re forced to see the things they desire as dangerous. As human nature evinces, though, repressing desire only makes it stronger, and it’s the palpable intensity of desire as communicated between Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen that makes Leviticus work better as romance than horror. There are some genuinely unnerving moments — a bloody invasion of home (and mouth) is a standout — but Chiarella’s script is too underbaked, and the cinematography too slick, for these elements to really take hold. Character development is minimal, as is the elaboration of the town itself, which has plenty of forbidding rural-industrial atmosphere but little in the way of social logic. Everything is in the service of allegory; thankfully, Leviticus is so short the allegory doesn’t have time to be beaten into the ground, nor, regrettably, does it have time to be fully fleshed out.

Disclosure Day

DISCLOSURE DAY   ***

Steven Spielberg

2026

IDEA:  With the world on the brink of geopolitical catastrophe, a cybersecurity expert and a TV weatherwoman are involved in a plot to publicly reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

BLURB:  Disclosure Day starts as a paranoid conspiracy thriller and ends as an irony-free, self-reflexive paean to the power of movies to foster awe, empathy, and unity. Perhaps only a filmmaker as titanically venerable as Spielberg could get away with implicitly positing himself, and his work, as channels for the communication of a higher power (art), the same way Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild becomes an empathic vessel through which the extraterrestrials appeal to humankind’s better nature. Spielberg’s cinema has always been one rooted in primal pleasures and fears, connecting us to our most easily dazzled (and vulnerable) selves, and in Disclosure Day he makes a studio-set replica of Fairchild’s old family home serve as a madeleine-trigger to awaken her buried childhood memories. What could be a more perfect metaphor for Spielberg’s films, fastidiously constructed simulacra that bring us back to our own primal scenes? Spielberg and Koepp expand the metaphor as the film progresses, linking aliens and the stories told by moving images as figures of a collective faith that could, ideally, change human consciousness for the better. Disclosure Day’s earnest belief in this possibility — achieved via legacy media, no less — feels admittedly at odds with our increasingly atomized, factious society. Such guileless optimism is not exactly helped by being grafted to some very dubious plotting and character writing. But goofy and implausible are par for the invariably fun Spielberg genre course, as is schmaltzy humanism. Despite its messiness, Disclosure Day is still the expertly shot, edited, and acted work of a master, full of Kamiński’s dynamic, pirouetting camerawork and invigorated, especially, by Blunt’s alternately vivacious and tense, funny, polyglot performance as a possessed woman who persists even when she has no idea what she’s doing, or why. She’s all of us, beckoned alike by the terrifying unknowns of life and the transformative potential of stories to soothe them. If it’s hard to fully believe in the film’s message of hope, Spielberg seems to be entreating us: try.