“What’s in a name?” — as with his last film, the haunting and radiant Phoenix, writer-director Christian Petzold is perpetually fascinated with the notion of assumed identity. How much of our status is attached to the name others call us?…
3 Faces Movie Review | VIFF 2018
Jafar Pahani’s 3 Faces escapes the confines of the director’s home (This Is Not a Film) and even Tehran (Taxi) as the recording of a young girl’s apparent suicide spurs him, and celebrated Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari, to take a odyssey…
Transit Movie Review | VIFF 2018
What if purgatory was a Gestapo police state in contemporary Marseilles? Once again, Christian Petzold’s romantic waltz of Hollywood dreamscape and grounded emotional reality is not so much a distracting contrivance in the case of Transit as a compelling abstraction.…
12 Most Memorable Movie Scenes of 2015
The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015), The Bear Attack Yes, every single word of praise you’ve read and/or heard is true. One can’t escape talking about The Revenant without mentioning its pièce de résistance: a bear mauling that seems to be…
Movie Review: ‘Phoenix’
Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), a Holocaust survivor, visits a doctor’s office to have her face recreated after a gunshot wound left her visage and psyche disfigured. For her new face and identity, the doctor gives her two choices: to look…