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There is no way to analyze Burning without making some kind of reference to Blow-Up , the revolutionary movie by Michelangelo Antonioni. Like the 1966 Italian movie, the work of South Korean Chang-dong Lee deals with a crime that may have happened. Or not. Also, a key element in the plot is pantomime. After meeting Jongsu, a former colleague from a rural village near the border with North Korea, Haemi, who works as a dancer at a store door, does a pantomime that captures the boy's attention: by simulating the tangerine tasting, she suggests that he does not imagine that the fruit is there, just forget it is not. She says, "If you really want to eat tangerine, your mouth will salivate and taste will be great." Haemi takes a trip to the Kalahari desert to meet the bushmen, and leaves Jongsu responsible for feeding her cat. The animal is another riddle of the film because it is never seen (or perhaps once), although it consumes the food and fills the litter box. When she returns from Africa, Haemi is in the company of Ben, a wealthy man who lives in a large apartment, drives a Porsche and has numerous art works. In addition to jealousy, Jongsu has a perception that Ben, whom he defines as a "Gatsby" (a reference to Scott Fitzgerald's novel), is not a good person. There is an amazing scene in which the three meet in front of the small farm of Jongsu and smoke marijuana, while Haemi dances the ritual of the Bushmen representing the Great Hunger, or know the meaning of life. Ben disdains the art of the girl and reveals to Jongsu that his pastime is to burn greenhouses of rural areas. After this scene, the film becomes chaotic, harrowing and enigmatic. The direction is economic and the calm of the supposed villain only increases the despair. Are we seeing what we want to see and not what is real? Jongsu, overcome by doubts, begins a paranoid search for a crime that may or may not has taken place. To paraphrase the Italian film, the ending is a blow up of anguish. The solution is unexpected, though predictable. We see something real, ablaze, happening. #changdonglee #review

The Atalante tells a simple story, however, as in works of art, it is the way of telling that puts the movie as a poetic experience. Shot in 1934, the scenes seem, at first, to repeat the vocation of documentarist director Jean Vigo (who would die before the distribution of the film), portraying a marriage in a country town. As if out of a silent comedy, two gaudy men run before the guests to prepare a reception for the bride on the barge L’Atalante , who travels on the Seine between Le Havre and Paris. There is no bridal party and, still in a wedding dress, Juliette is literally hoisted on board hanging from the boom of the sails. Soon the girl will discover that being married in a boat represents living together not only with her husband, the young captain Jean, but also with his mate, old Daddy Jules with his cats and a cabin boy. It is inevitable that the new inhabitant will come into conflict with the unhygienic habits of the three sailors. There is no grandeur in the film, except when Juliette hears on the radio that the boat is arriving in Paris. The captain invites her to a night out in the Light City, but the adventure is thwarted because Jules goes out for one of his binges. Later, Jean walks with his beloved in the cafes and salons of Paris, where Juliette finds a Chaplinian magician that flirts and dances with her, under the angry glance of Jean. The episode with this character ends up by awakening in Juliette a desire to know more about the city, which is not disloyalty to Jean, but a rapture of a country girl dazzled by the big city. When she leaves the boat alone, Jean is overcome with jealousy and anticipates departure, leaving her in the city. The separation is painful for both. She suffers the violence and neglect of the city. He suffers from his wife's absence. The director leads the misadventures of both lightly, and although the pain is clear, there is nothing more than the certainty of a puerile act of jealousy. Experienced, old Jules knows the captain will never be the same again until Juliette returns aboard. #jeanvigo #review

Inhabitants of a capitalist universe, it is natural that, when we go to the movies, we marvel at the wonders that reveal where the capital is. Capernaum subverts this logic by showing or practically spilling on the screen where capital is not. People who stay on the fringes of income distribution are commonly called “economically vulnerable”. The film does not stop at political or moral issues, but makes clear that if there is vulnerability in the world, none is greater than that experienced by children. Zain is a boy of about 12 years old (not even the parents know when he was born) getting handcuffed in a court in Beirut. We imagine that it is "naturally" some kind of delinquency that "this kind of people" commits. However, through the narratives, we find that it does not. He has been serving time already for a few years for stabbing a man. What is involved here is a lawsuit, proposed by the boy, against his parents for having committed the "crime" of placing him in the world. The film is a succession of flashbacks that (do not) explain Zain's story but draw a profile of the children's universe in a place where they come to the world trough a religious discourse that masks an odd evil of parents. Ignorant, addicted, and slothful, they do not care a minute worrying about their children's fate. They do not know when they were born, where they are, they do not send them to school, and if an opportunity for profit arises, they do not mind "raffling off" a younger daughter into the ubiquitous lust of human predators. Fleeing from home, Zain receives, perhaps for the first time in his life, a bit of affection and attention from an illegal Ethiopian immigrant Rahil and goes on to take care of her son, the toddler Yonas, who, due to her mother's arrest, becomes a mission of life for the boy. Zain becomes a hero: he becomes gigantic, resilient, he invents unbelievable strategies. However, villains are many, some because they hunt, others because they do not care, others because they deny reality. Victory is impossible, just as this world legion of heroes is disposable. #review #labaki

Hard to find in the constellation of David Lynch films a work so crudely and at the same time with some coherence unusual to the director's work. Beginning as a satire to the American Way of Life, the film features a town called Lumberton with lawns, flowers, and gentle firefighters. After a domestic accident, the camera descends to ground level, where it reveals a community of insects, such as to say that under a beautiful landscape, underlies much corruption and dirt. Blue Velvet then changes the direction of the plot for mystery movie: Jeffrey, a college student son of the man injured in the initial scene, returns from a visit to the hospital when he finds, in a vacant lot, a human ear, which carries in a little bag to the police officer Williams, his neighbor. But instead of leaving the investigation to the professionals, the boy decides to follow the case on his own, and worse, with the help of the daughter of the policeman, the beautiful and dreamy Sandy. It is not long before the couple discovers a relationship between the event and nightclub singer Dorothy Valens. Going to the woman's apartment, Jeffrey not only learns that her husband (the owner of the ear) and his young son were kidnapped, as a witness that the abductor, the gangster Frank, turned the singer into his sex slave. With Frank's departure, Jeffrey is discovered by Dorothy. From this, an unlikely relationship begins. Feeling safe with the young man, the singer embraces him and asks him to ... spank her. This ambiguity could become the new thread of the movie's driver: to what extent can the abusive relationship of the psychopath Frank be pleasurable to Dorothy, and how much will Jeffrey dive into the sought-after role of the perpetrator? Still missing in these issues, we are surprised, along with Jeffrey, by the crazed Frank (perhaps one of the best performances of Dennis Hopper) that comes on the scene and retakes the previous theme. If there is an (improbable) attempt at a happy ending, as in Sandy's dream with little robins, we realize that it is indeed a dream. Or a nightmare. #lynch #review

Shoplifters don’t reveal, in the English title, who these criminals are. In the original title in Japanese, it is explicit that the members of the "family" Shibata are contumacious store thieves. However, it is not only this activity that unites them. The family has strong ties except those of blood, for it is the shortage that makes this cluster of people stand and act like an actual family. The matriarch Hatsue, the Grandma, lives on a small alimony received from her ex-husband since the divorce. Today dead, her husband continues to receive posthumous honors. In the house, tiny, still live the Daddy and the Mother, Osamu and Nobuyo, that we will discover later to have united in a striking and traumatic episode. He is a hod carrier and she works in a laundry room, picking up, here and there, little forgotten trinkets in the pockets of the clothes. There are two more inhabitants in the house: a 10-year-old boy (who sleeps in a closet) and a young Aki, the granddaughter of Hatsue's ex-husband, who works as hostess in a club, where she shows off for costumers. In the opening scene, Osamu and the boy Shota return home after a choreographed swipe at a market (though they have forgotten the shampoo), when they encounter a 5-year-old girl left on the balcony of her house, probably by her violent and negligentparents. Fearing that the little girl Yuri dies of cold, they take her with them to their home, where she is at first rejected, and later "adopted" by the family. Although the girl later becomes wanted by the police, the Shibatas do not worry because, in their particular code of ethics, they understand that there is only kidnapping if there is a request for ransom. Likewise, they believe there is no theft if the goods have not yet been sold to clients unless the store that sells them is going bankrupt. Hirokazu Kore-eda builds a minimalist and beautiful movie as if it were a large onion that we were gradually stripping until we discovered, among acid layers, a core that brings tears to our eyes. #koreeda #review

On Body and Soul is a movie going the wrong way of the cinema. Little is said about feelings. The symbolic dimension is replaced by a concreteness that leaves no room for dreams, except for a single one, which the protagonists share. Endre and Mária, a middle-aged financial director and a young quality inspector work in a slaughterhouse. Their solitary lives can be seen in the intimacy of their apartments through contrasts: the dark interior, illuminated only by the TV light of the man's apartment, and a bright light in the girl's. He, who has paralysis in his left arm, seems to avoid life perhaps not to repeat some pain. She does not get any kind of social skills or physical contact because she's plunged into an autistic spectrum. In the dream that they live together unknowingly, discovered at random by a skeptical psychiatrist, a stag and a doe walk through a frozen forest in search of food. The scenery is bleak and only what unites them also keeps them alive. Far away, in real life, a crowd of well-fed cattle waits patiently in line at the slaughter. This is done in a clear and revealing way: bodies are beheaded and dismembered in a bloodbath that runs down the floor. Endre and Mária share their dreams as they tell the episode of a sitcom watched the day before. He is confined to an emotional involvement because he does not want to delude himself. She does not even know how to do it. However, by talking to his child therapist, and reworking the lived scenes with Lego mini-figures in his apartment, he begins to learn to exert his sensory skills. The director Ildikó Enyedi manages to lead this paradox in a dry way, as the characters do, but in a calm mood like the look of an ox that is no longer butchered because the siren signaled the end of the shift. In the moment of greater pain, which is also felt by the audience, when the sum of all anxiety is experienced as inexorable anguish, something happens and shuffles the opposites. It is not a happy ending as it is known. The dream empties. #enyedi #review

Citizen Kane is not, as is claimed, the best movie ever produced. But, of course, it's a must-have presence in the best collections of all time. In addition, Gregg Toland's cinematography may qualify the film as one of the best black-and-white works ever made. The unforgettable opening is a mixture of horror and film noir and shows a castle on a hill: it is Xanadu, the refuge of the millionaire Charles Foster Kane, inspired by the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The opening speech is the last word uttered by the newspaper-tycoon before he died: Rosebud! The meaning of this puzzling word opens a question for its main newspaper, the New York Inquirer , that will leave to the reporter Jerry Thompson the mission of revealing the secret, that will be known of the public only in the final scene. The revelation of the real meaning of that name is considered one of the most fantastic paradoxes in the history of cinema. In search of what could be "Rosebud," the reporter reveals various aspects of Kane's life through flashbacks, not always ordered and sometimes disconnected. They interviewed the secretary of the millionaire, Bernstein; his best friend Leland; the second wife Susan Alexander, the pivot of the scandal that removed Kane from politics; as well as the unpublished personal diary of Thatcher, Charles's estate administrator and tutor until his 25th birthday. Separated from the Colorado family when he was a boy to have a training in New York that would enable him to manage the fortune acquired almost by chance by his mother, Kane reaches the age of 25 and, to the despair of Thatcher, is not interested in no kind of investment except the little Inquirer who becomes the starting point for his journalistic empire. Unfortunately, Thompson's research is unsuccessful, except for his brilliant conclusion that while Rosebud is one of the few things Charles has never owned or lost, "no word can explain a man's life." #welles #review

Rome is one of the most impressive movies of this century. Meticulous, grandiose and thrilling, the direction and cinematography of Alfonso Cuarón achieve the feat of re-creating the culture of the 1970s in Mexico City under the simple-minded perspective of a faithful domestic servant without losing a single important detail. Although the camera follows all the moves of Cleo, also nanny of the four children of the couple António and Sofia, the view that we have of the large-format open plans is always from the bottom up, as if we shared with one of the children (probably the director) the admiration of monumental scenes, like the waves of the sea, which constitute, for an adult, dayly ordinary facts. Roma was a middle-class neighborhood with luxurious homes and staffs of maids, cooks, babysitters and drivers. From dawn on, when she wakes up the children to school, until dusk, when she turns out the lights, Cleo seems to attend to all desires, serving meals, cleaning the dog Borras' droppings, washing all the clothes and whispering with the cook Adela in the Mixtec dialect. The meticulous and safe way in which the master introduces the powerful Galaxy 500 into the tight hallway that serves as a garage is a phallic symbolism that indicates a patriarchal and masculine predominance in all the conflicts of the plot. Abandoned by him, Mrs. Sophie will say about women "we are all alone." Interchangeable in the daily routine, there are defining moments, such as the father's trip without return, an earthquake, a broken window in a fight, a fire at New Year's party and the (almost) drowning of children in the Tuxpan sea. One of the most poignant scenes, Cleo's delivery by real doctors and nurses, comes just after one of Mexico's greatest tragedies, the Halconazo, when dozens of students were massacred by paramilitaries in 1971 Corpus Christi. At the end of the film, the family returns to the house once more. Cleo expresses for the first time a desire: she did not want her baby. #cuarón #review

Lucky , for portraying the life of a World War II veteran, could have death as the main motive. However, what we see in the 88 minutes is life. It is the friends, landscapes, thoughts, and habits of this nagging old man who makes no effort to please or cared for himself. A resident of a desert city in southern California, Lucky, in a memorable rendition of Harry Dean Stanton, leads a methodical and frugal life. He lives alone and wakes up early, although we do not know the time because he does not set his alarm clock. He does five yoga exercises and drinks a glass of cold milk, the only content of your refrigerator, and smoke all the time. The routine, which includes a trip to the cafeteria for his coffee plenty with cream and sugar, and crossword puzzles, is broken the day Lucky faints. This fact, to which the local doctor does not give much importance, changes entirely the direction of the facts, from a mere chronicle of customs to a reflection on solitude and impermanence. However, this is done lightly. Memorable scenes happen: concerned about the elderly, waitress Loretta goes to his home, where they end up smoking marijuana and watching a Liberace show on TV. In a conversation with another war veteran, played with extreme delicacy by Tom Skerritt, Lucky, who was a cook on an ammunition ship, hears, heartily, the story of a little Japanese girl and her way of facing death. From that episode, Lucky decides to set his alarm clock. A song sung with mariachis at a children's party serves as a reminder that the protagonist did not marry or have children. That night at the bar, after hearing for the umpteenth time his friend Howard's complaint about the escape of his tortoise President Roosevelt, Lucky challenges the owner Elaine, lighting a cigarette. Rather, he reflects on the truth of life, stating that everything and everyone, including cigarettes, will disappear into blackness and void. In the final scene, Lucky smiles to his fate without noticing that the tortoise comes back sneaky home. #carrolllynch #review

The three ideograms of kabuki , the Japanese theater form depicted in Floating Weeds , signify singing, dancing, and skill. The movie is all this, and more: music, cinematography and art direction are so coordinated that the play resembles a symphony of the kind we usually hum for the rest of our lives. In the village of fishermen, where the plot takes place, there are no grandiose characters; it is as if they were people from the neighborhood living their lives day by day. The protagonist, Komajuro, is a middle-aged actor who leads the troupe of a decadent and itinerant theater company, artists known in Japan as "floating weeds." Called the master by the other components of the team, the old actor spends a lot of time in Oyoshi's saki house, with whom he has had a child in the past. Komajuro rejoices with the boy, a post office worker who thinks he is his uncle. The constant absences arouse suspicions, and later jealousy, of his current companion and star of the company Sumiko, who discovers the secret of the master, and, strongly rebuked by him, hires the young actress Kayo to seduce Kiyoshi, the son of Komajuro. This plot leads to unexpected consequences, as the two young people fall in love. Yasujiro Ozu conducts these disagreements in a peculiar way, far from Western drama and much more economical than the cyclothymic of romantic comedies. Empathy with the characters is conquered by a trick of direction: most dialogues occur without the characters looking at each other. The look is usually directed directly to the audience. The beautiful cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa is made in a lower position than the actors. Among the scenes, the director inserts what he called a “pillow shot”, a short video of about seven seconds, which allows the viewer to "recover his calm". In the final scene, Komajuro, like many husbands, throws a tantrum at the boarding station. Gradually, it calms down, the train departs, and we get the wonderful music of Takanobu Saito. #ozu #review

Avengers: Endgame is more than a movie. In its three hours of projection, what is seen is a parade of superheroes and visual effects, true homage to the legion of fans who, since 2008, as in a great TV series, have been following the saga. Who is a follower of the Marvel Comic Universe on film screens, knows that after half of humanity and most heroes have been "wiped out" by Titan Thanos, bets on a possible rematch between the survivors and the possessor of the powerful Infinity Stones was a matter of time. The remaining Avengers (Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Combat Machine, Rocket, and Nebula), still without knowing the whereabouts of the Hawkeye, make a trip, with Captain Marvel, to the planet where the Titan is, where fight an unsuccessful battle for the recovery of the cosmic gems. Five years later, Ant-Man returns from his journey to the Quantum Realm, which began before the Thanos' crushing "snap”, and finds a world totally devastated, with abandoned ships and cars, empty streets, and a memorial named after thousands of dead, including his. Her daughter Cassie is alive, but she has become a teenager. Realizing that he traveled in time, Ant-Man presents the idea to the Avengers, at first rejected for being unlikely, though not impossible according to Hulk. The scientist explains that when we travel to the past, this becomes our future, while our present becomes the new past. With Captain America and the Iron Man as protagonists, the team travels back in time, where they will recover some fundamental concepts to heroism such as honor, sacrifice, and tragedy. The Avengers, as we shall discover over time, are susceptible to the strength of this element and, unlike what we have become accustomed to seeing in the old comic books, are subject to impermanence, as can be seen in the final battle, one of the most impressive scenes already seen on the screens. Among the losses, the saddest, certainly, was that of Stan Lee. #review #russobrothers

In A Fantastic Woman , we are at first deceived by director Sebastián Lelio to believe that the main character of the movie is Orlando, a middle-aged businessman who owns a textile company in Santiago, Chile. Shortly afterward, we are introduced to the woman with whom she is dividing her life: the young salsa singer Marina Vidal, who performs at the Galeria hotel club, but we will discover to be a waitress on a daily basis. After a romantic dinner, the couple dance, talk about a trip to the Iguassu Falls in Brazil and, back to Orlando apartment, make love and sleep peacefully, until, in the middle of the night, Orlando felt sick. Going to the hospital, he falls down the stairs and is supported by Marina who could take him, but not in time: the businessman dies of an aneurysm. Confined outside, in a restricted area labeled "Area Sucia" (dirty area), Marina is interrogated and investigated by the doctor before receiving news of the companion's death. The reason for the mistrust is that the girl is transgender and her ID still carries her male name. The issue of the movie is not Marina being treated "as it were" woman. She knows herself a woman, full of the love of Orlando (she had recently moved to the apartment), is in mourning for his beloved, and has neither the time, nor the patience, nor the desire to be questioned by issues that are absolutely irrelevant to her for your moment of pain. She will, however, discover to his despair that Orlando's former family, starting with his ex-wife Sonia, and his son Bruno, rush to take her away from everything that concerns the entrepreneur. At first with the car, then the apartment, and even the bitch Diabla that Marina prides herself on being a gift she received. Benjamin Echazarreta's camera is nervous, impatient, sometimes hallucinated, showing nuances of a reality that frightens us. In the end, something is returned to Marina. Dignified by her own conviction for the right to respect, security and sexuality, Marina finishes the film by singing an aria of Handel: Ombra mai fu (There was never a shadow). #lelio #review