Diego Semerene
Movies reviews only
Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Other People's Children (2022) |
The film’s most authentic moments are those that leave its main character breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 16, 2023
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Joyland (2022) |
Joyland’s dignity is in its commitment to realism. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 01, 2023
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The Plough (2023) |
The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 26, 2023
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Disco Boy (2023) |
Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 23, 2023
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Blue Jean (2022) |
Blue Jean is most remarkable when it simply observes its main character as she exists in her unmanageable world. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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The Blue Caftan (2022) |
The film is best experienced by simply wallowing in the lushness of its fabrics, sartorial and symbolic alike, refusing the temptation to unspool its poetic parallels. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 01, 2023
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Close (2022) |
The film reminds us that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 16, 2023
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Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (2020) |
The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.
- Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 31, 2022
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Private Desert (2021) |
Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 22, 2022
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Mother and Son (2022) |
Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is a lovely film about feminine strength that also refuses to glorify motherhood. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 19, 2022
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Plan 75 (2022) |
With stinging precision, Hayakawa Chie reveals a culture that seems almost mobilized to destroy its own soul. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 22, 2022
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Paris, 13th District (2021) |
Once the film digresses from its focus on lovers trying to learn from loves failures, its desperation becomes unmistakable. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 12, 2022
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Cow (2021) |
Throughout Andrea Arnolds film, a kind of affective connection is formed between animal and the cinematic apparatus. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 02, 2022
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Great Freedom (2021) |
In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 01, 2022
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Marry Me (2022) |
Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icons indiscriminate commercial voracity. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 10, 2022
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Playground (2021) |
Playground is practically an exercise in the use of off-camera space, and a masterful and refreshingly consistent one at that. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 04, 2022
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Simple Passion (2020) |
The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux's story in its aesthetics. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Lost Daughter (2021) |
For a while, Olivia Colman's expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 06, 2021
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Agnes (2021) |
The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 06, 2021
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I Want to Talk About Duras (2021) |
With I Want to Talk About Duras, Claire Simon strips cinema to its bare essentials, not unlike Marguerite Duras's approach to literature and film. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 22, 2021
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Hit the Road (2021) |
For too much of its running time, Hit the Road is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 04, 2021
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A Chiara (2021) |
The film's initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 24, 2021
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Unclenching the Fists (2021) |
Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman's body. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 12, 2021
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Who You Think I Am (2019) |
Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character's account of her own suffering for her therapist's pathologizing assessment. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 31, 2021
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The Meaning of Hitler (2020) |
Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 10, 2021
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John and the Hole (2020) |
John and the Hole is most impressive when it proceeds as a series of confounding and uncanny situations. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 04, 2021
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Against the Current (2020) |
Against the Current's style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who's anything but generic. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 22, 2021
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Summer of 85 (2020) |
François Ozon's paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 13, 2021
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Moby Doc (2021) |
The film's tendency to over-explain, over-intellectualize, and over-script events leaves little room for spontaneity and doubt. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 25, 2021
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P!nk: All I Know So Far (2021) |
The film isn't interested in exploring the fissures in Pink's life in the rare moments when they begin to surface. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 17, 2021
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Gull (2020) |
The film explores what erupts when women decide to walk away from their passive positions and speak up through more fictitious and allegorical means. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 02, 2021
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Radiograph of a Family (2020) |
Radiograph of a Family is an essay film about photographs as barometers of female unhappiness. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 02, 2021
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Paris Calligrammes (2020) |
While Ulrike Ottinger accesses the most consequential of decades through nostalgia, she does so with humility. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 22, 2021
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Mr. Bachmann and His Class (2021) |
The documentary exists within the very restricted pantheon of films that successfully reap the cinematic potential of pedagogy. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 31, 2021
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Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2021) |
Lili Horvát's film delights in wallowing in ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 18, 2021
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Acasa, My Home (2020) |
The film is at its most moving when it lingers on the face of children who are impotent to return to the world they used to call home. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 12, 2021
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Uncle Frank (2020) |
When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 23, 2020
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Collective (2019) |
The film reminds us that without investigative reporting there's no democracy, and that traditional expectations around impartiality and objectivity may be untenable in the face of horror. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 17, 2020
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Dating Amber (2020) |
The film rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 19, 2020
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I Carry You With Me (2020) |
Heidi Ewing's tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 01, 2020
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My name is Margiela (2019) |
Reiner Holzemer's adulation of his subject feels most credible because he spends a lot of time focusing on the clothes. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 10, 2020
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Sunless Shadows (2019) |
Mehrdad Oskouei's documentary is striking for the way its subjects describe horrific forms of violence in the plainest of language. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 03, 2020
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The Painted Bird (2019) |
Václav Marhoul's film is at its most magnificent when it lingers on the poetry of its images. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 15, 2020
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Family Romance, LLC (2019) |
We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it's as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 30, 2020
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Ayiti mon amour (2016) |
What David Teboul finds in Siberia is quite disheartening: that love, when it materializes in the figure of the lover, burns fast. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 25, 2020
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(undefined) |
Across the film, the most idiosyncratic reactions of an ordinary human become real documents of human history. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 26, 2020
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Crystal Swan (2018) |
Throughout the film, it's as if mundane objects hold the remedies for the wretchedness of everyday life. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 20, 2020
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Dear Diary (1994) |
In the film, the matter of cinema is the process of creativity, arduous and unrealized, as it ebbs and flows. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 12, 2020
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On a Magical Night (2019) |
Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 05, 2020
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Babenco: Tell Me When I Die (2019) |
Though there's unquestionable dissonance between the dying veteran filmmaker and his much younger pupil, their roles aren't so fixed. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 25, 2020
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