Trying to describe the suffering of civilians in war tends to fall short—because abstractions, statistics, and an overview of generalities, creates distance in our minds, despite the degree of accuracy in reporting. We are individuals, and all human experience is such. Therefore we must see events on that level, and imagine being a person in the midst of all this, to genuinely understand. Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi gives us access to that experience, in a documentary about her friendship with a young Palestinian woman in Gaza entitled Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Farsi is herself an exile from…

A rec league baseball game conveys a gently humorous truth about American men trying to hold on to the rituals of their younger days. On a Sunday afternoon in a small New England town, sometime in the 1990s, two amateur baseball teams play one last game on a field that will soon have to make way for a new school. They are what you call “rec” teams, short for recreational, that play for fun and allow any local adult male to join who wants to be a part. The two teams in this game are Atlas Paint, in red, and The…

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s final film is a metafictional journey through the world of Japanese war movies, and their relationship to the actual horrors of war. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is famous in the West mainly for his film House, from 1977, which so far I know only by reputation as a wild, playful, and surrealist ride through the horror genre. But he’s directed over seventy films that are largely considered eccentric and avant-garde. I started watching his final film, from 2019, Labyrinth of Cinema without realizing any of this, purely on word of mouth. Labyrinth of Cinema begins with a mysterious old hipster in…

A man discovers a vast network of empty rooms and hallways, in a film about the dangers of the unconscious.  I just watched a weird and genuinely creepy film, currently getting a lot of attention, called Backrooms. One of the unusual aspects of this movie is that the plot, such at is, is secondary to the visual and auditory experience. A disorienting opening sequence takes the fuzzy point of view of a video camera being used by an unnamed traveler in a series of nondescript, mostly empty rooms. Why this traveler is there we don’t know, but he wants out,…

A young photographer insinuates himself into the entourage surrounding an up-and-coming pop singer. On social media, a lurker is someone who mostly just reads other people’s posts but, for whatever reason, rarely participates. In the recent film Lurker, written and directed by Alex Russell, this idea is combined with that of the fan or follower, someone devoted to or obsessed with a celebrity. The result is a different kind of suspense, exploring the psychology of someone on the margins desperate to stand in the light of someone else’s fame. Matthew Morning is a shy gawky young man working at a…

In Zambia, an extended family’s beloved uncle has died, but one of his nieces holds a secret about him. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Zambian writer and director Rungano Nyoni’s second feature film, is a highly accomplished ensemble drama about family secrets. Secrets don’t just reveal themselves right away, and the film’s style is accordingly a matter of glimpses and intuitions. Shula, a young woman played by Susan Chardy, is driving home from a costume party, still wearing her elaborate disguise, when she finds a dead body in the road. When she gets out of the car to look at…

A Canadian family must cope with the mental illness of the eldest son. When an artist attempts to illuminate painful memories, “less is more” is the general rule—one that is perhaps not followed frequently enough. Canadian director Sophy Romvari, after making award winning short films for ten years, adheres to that rule in her autobiographical first feature Blue Heron. Romvari was the youngest child in a family of four that moved from Hungary to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 1989. The family in Blue Heron is also of Hungarian origin. Although this element doesn’t seem crucial to the story, she evidently…

Two conspiracy nuts kidnap a woman CEO in the belief that she’s one of a group of extraterrestrials sent to destroy the planet. I missed seeing Bugonia, the latest film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, when it was playing in theaters. I was a bit wary after being disappointed by his big spectacle Poor Things a few years ago, but I finally caught up recently and was unexpectedly taken with it. Lanthimos’s radical absurdist style caught on in Hollywood, yet he’s remained thoroughly nonconformist, using weird unsettling humor to draw painful conclusions about human nature. Bugonia feels different in a…

Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of recovery from sexual abuse has been dramatized into a startling visionary film by Kristen Stewart. The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s first feature film as a director, is an adaptation of a memoir by the same title from fiction writer, poet, and essayist Lidia Yuknavitch. Yuknavitch grew up in San Francisco and Florida in the 1960s and ‘70s, was encouraged by a supportive school coach to become a competitive swimmer, and got a sports scholarship to a college in Austin, whereupon her addiction to alcohol and other drugs derailed her potential Olympics career. She then careened…

Cambodian director Rithy Panh dramatizes the true story of three journalists who were given permission to interview Pol Pot during the last few months of his murderous regime. At the age of fifteen Rithy Panh managed to escape the Cambodian genocide, but the entire rest of his family—his parents, sisters, and nephews—were murdered. He made his way to Paris, where he got interested in movies, and eventually graduated from film school there. His career as a director has been devoted almost exclusively to examining that terrible period when the Khmer Rouge conducted mass executions of anyone labeled as bourgeois or…