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Everyone on this journey is a student of life. The futile quest and fruitless interrogation are paralleled by inane small talk among the various investigators as well as a series of fraught private conversations between the party’s two professionals—the glib prosecuting attorney and a self-effacing…

[...] The Strange Case has its documentary aspects as well. In one apparent non sequitur, Oliveira frames the house cat intently watching the landlady’s canary. The shot is held until, somewhere in the vastness beyond the frame, a dog barks, humorously underscoring the cat’s presumably unscripted c…

Let’s call her the spirit of the place. Paris apartments are cluttered, Parisian lives are messy, the city is shown so congested you can smell the exhaust fumes. To cope, Hou himself has adapted a looser, more lyrical style—using window reflections, some of which seem digitally sweetened, and shall…

[...] Thriving on the modest truth of clumsy mishaps and incoherent riffs, fueled by a combination of narcissism and diffidence, Mumblecore reflects sensibilities formed by MTV’s The Real World (our life is a movie) and Seinfeld (constant discourse), as well as The Blair Witch Project (DIY plus Int…

Lynch’s notion of pure cinema is a matter of tawdry scenarios and disconcerting tonal shifts. Everything in Inland Empire is uncanny, unmoored, and out of joint. The major special effect is the creepy merging of spaces or times. Do the characters travel through wormholes from Los Angeles to Lodz an…