Review: Skolimowski's "EO" is a miracle!

by Cláudio Alves

Can donkeys dream of heaven? One hopes so, for they need not search for hell in sleepy fantasy – they live it every day, wide awake. A world defined by human cruelty demands dreams of something better, something beyond the pain. Is it peace, love, a state of joy? Maybe it's red.

EO all starts in red. Bathed in scarlet light, skin touches fur, human hands over the animal's body, a trance-like choreography that's both intimate and public. There's a closeness to these touches that transcends their physical softness, a beauty that's more than mere performance for circus audiences – it's that heaven we spoke about, but maybe it's hell, too. Red will linger, a memory, perhaps a reverie. Dreams are nightmares by another name, and so is EO, both nightmare and dream right from the beginning…

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Review: "Holy Spider" weaves a web of provocations

by Cláudio Alves

"Holy Spider" | © UtopiaThe world's obsession with true crime is as old as crime itself. With every new format and possible presentation, another wave of such media arises, making us think, each time, that the collective obsession is a new phenomenon. Oh, how wrong we are, for as much as things change, they remain the same. One aspect constant with every iteration of the true-crime craze is the glorification of the killer. False equivalencies manifest, equating human monsters to criminal geniuses. Great purposes are projected unto them, ideas of grandeur and abstract magnetism. From popular podcasts to Netflix's Jeffrey Dahmer show, true-crime narratives make celebrities out of murderers and exploit truth into legend.

Ali Abbasi's latest film challenges this state of affairs. Reenacted violence and political commentary are at the center of Holy Spider's controversial reputation, but its demystification of the serial killer figure constitutes the picture's most radical provocation…

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Review: South Korea's Oscar Hopeful "Decision to Leave"

by Cláudio Alves

© MUBI

A woman stands in a room, alone. Wallpapered motifs encircle her in a swirl of blue-green something. Are they waves or mountaintops, those shapes repeated into infinity? Maybe they're both, maybe neither. Maybe they're everything. 

According to a Confucian proverb, the wise man admires water, the kind man admires mountains. Or maybe it's benevolence and virtue, some other translation across languages. Two complementing sides of the same person, perhaps a binary of human natures, these words reveal more than their scholarly meaning – at least, they do in Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave. Ideas of duality percolate throughout the work, as does the attempt to understand the unfathomable reality of another person. We try to find order in chaos, logic in that which has none, pursuing an understanding that will always be out of grasp. Every single one of us is a mystery to others, and to try to transcend the impossibility of knowing someone else is a fool's errand, the most beautiful thing in the world, ecstasy holding hands with despair. It's love…

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Review: "Piggy" is a visceral nightmare

by Cláudio Alves

© Magnet Releasing

Somewhere in the Spanish countryside, in a small town of Extremadura, Sara lives the kind of earthly hell familiar to many of those who grew up as fat teens. Judgment comes from every direction, shame inflicted upon her until it curdles the spirit. It's not just strangers that hurt, for a casual remark from one's mother can be so lacerating it leaves a scar. Still, there's nothing worse for Sara than her peers, cruel kids who couch their hatred in vacuous assertions that they mean well, that it's for her own good. A trip to the pool for Sara becomes another opportunity for torment at the hands of mean girls, including former friends.

Nearly drowned, her clothes stolen, a humiliated Sara walks home half-naked under the summer sun. It's then that a mysterious van appears, looming ominous in her path. Inside, the girl's tormentors lay powerless, victimizers turned victims at the hands of a kidnapper cum killer. Sara sees it all, the man in charge sees her, and they both do nothing – the van drives away…

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Review: The Great Movement

by Cláudio Alves

In 2016, Bolivian director Kiro Russo took his first feature to Locarno, where the Jury for the Golden Peacock presented him with a special Centenary Award for Best Debut Film. Dark Skull was an exercise in modern Neorealism, reinventing that movement from Italian cinema to a Latin American setting and deep-rooted specificity. More in line with the operatic myth of Visconti's La Terra Trema than with De Sica's urban melodramas, the film followed Elder's return to his desolate hometown upon his father's death. With the patriarch fallen, the son takes on his work, going into the mines like those before him. Those shadowy realms become the entrails of a cavernous titan through the gaze of Russo's camera, the industrial work shattered into a nightmare by mad editing, expressionist sound.

Underrated and under-discussed, Dark Skull was a tremendous triumph, and The Great Movement follows in its steps. Only this time, instead of Italian and German influence, Russo seems to be exploring the possibilities of Soviet montage and social realism, retrofitted as a new cinema for a new world…

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