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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (13) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (10) | Rotten (3)
Knows exactly where to look and what to ask, but never sticks around long enough to learn anything. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? is hardly a disappointment, but it does, in places, feel like a missed opportunity.
This is in many ways a frustrating film, its commitment admirable but its execution chaotic.
Despite charismatic subjects, the film seems so concerned with its handsome black-and-white aesthetics that it never feels angry enough.
It's a film that's supposed to be about anger, but anger, though visible throughout, is couched in something more subtle, more unclassifiable, and thus more disturbing.
A reminder that history's sprawling canvas is populated by lives that are desperately struggling to live and make the world around them better for those who come after.
Considering the anger captured onscreen, is now really the time for such softball humanism?
This is where Minervini excels: he neither intervenes nor disrupts. His subjective documentation lies in respecting the fluxes and fissures of these lives, which are liable to change at a moment's notice.
Although sometimes it becomes monotonous and somewhat repetitive, Minervini uses these deficiencies to reinforce the discourse of ethnic minorities to counteract the effects of a powerful media and political apparatus. [Full Review in Spanish]
It's character that matters here, fleeting moments rather than overarching drama. Perhaps this is hybrid filmmaking as termite art-and who cares how long it is, it probably should be longer.
Such quiet moments, captured in heartbreakingly vivid detail, make What You Gonna Do unassumingly powerful.
This work is more visceral and politically-charged, perhaps even angrier, than his previous films, whilst retaining elements of beauty.
Cinematographer Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos shoots everything with an unobtrusive beauty and Minervini is once more incredibly adept at making these slices of life cohere into both individual stories and in order to present a broader panorama. The
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