The Deathless Woman
Crimes buried in the shallow graves of the recent past rise to the surface of the poisoned earth, carrying with them the cold clarity of truth to cut through the pain that has tormented a continent for 80 years. Roz Mortimer’s sorrowful yet startling documentary The Deathless Woman delves into the topic of Nazi massacres in Eastern Europe, initially with tentative, inquisitive curiosity, eventually with a protracted, dolorous wail of rage – a rage of several generations, swollen to bursting point now that Europe takes a sudden, sickening turn back toward the extremism that first caused it. — Full Review at Screen on Screen
Honey Boy
In broad, bold strokes of stylistic whimsy, Alma Har’el tackles the complex though promising prospect of a Shia LaBeouf life story both written by the man himself, and starring himself as a fictionalized version of his father. Honey Boy is, as expected, a most personal movie, but where vividly personal content can, in the right artistic hands, be transformed into remarkably universal, the aggressive specificity with which LaBeouf exorcizes his many demons here never feels especially relevant to anyone but Shia. — Full Review at Screen on Screen
Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes
Making rather less of an impression is Jose Luis Torres Leiva’s Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes, a stylistic exercise so determined in its pursuit of artistic purity that it sterilizes itself into inconsequentiality. From the outset, Torres Leiva’s command of sound, of image, of all the essential elements in film craft is evident, yet it’s the only thing that’s evident – this slow, unfortunately un-insightful movie glacially glides over a minimal plot with minimal attention to supplementing anything substantial for what it lacks narratively. — Full Review at Screen on Screen
The Cave
An alternative, female call to prayer – or is it a call to action? – opens Feras Fayyad’s harrowing documentary The Cave, an immersive and horrifying real-life portrait of life and death in Eastern Ghouta under siege. As a call to attention, its brutal power achieves maximum impact as the seeming calm of the city’s skyline is, in the very first shot, disturbed irreparably by bombardment, destruction raining down from above in a violent display of truly alarming cruelty. What an astonishing opening to a picture that succeeds in astonishing further throughout, in regular sequences of panic, despair, and the simple physical ruin that falls upon a city and its inhabitants when it undergoes such incessant pulverizing. — Full Review at Screen on Screen
The Painted Bird
A wholly constructed reality, though rooted in historical fact, is rendered startlingly unreal in Vaclav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird. This is as confident a complete milieu as you’re likely to see in cinema, a vision of unholy, merciless totality pervading every element of its construction. Marhoul recreates the horrors of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe in vivid, graphic detail, situating his deranged conceptions in a work designed to function like an apathetic litany of misery and pain. Poetic flourishes aside (and, arguably, they should have been set entirely aside), this is a boldly prosaic view on death and discrimination, a casual catalogue of brutality without purpose nor consequence. — Full Review at Screen on Screen
La Llorona
Far from the grand European sprawl of The Painted Bird, Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona exists in its own little cloister, a hearing on a real country’s real history related in enclosed, isolated objectivity by those on polar opposite ends of the political spectrum it has created. A real history intermingles with the unreal, however, as Bustamante’s reckoning of Guatemala’s social character examines its spiritual character too, integrating it into this stunning, unsettling, stylistically rich chamber drama. The whole picture seems shrouded, under the oppressive shadow of the lingering influence of historical pain, its traumatic nature manifesting itself in different ways on different sections of society. — Full Review at Screen on Screen
