Another Gaze

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating Title/Year Author
On the Rocks (2020) Georgie Carr Coppola never pushes past the individual to the group, the city, society. Although we know there is life out there in the world, we never see it. EDIT
Posted Nov 25, 2020
Bortom det synliga - filmen om Hilma af Klint (2019) Esmé Hogeveen The cross-disciplinary curiosity found in her searching and ebullient works suggests a period wherein notions of futurity and research into the natural world carried less dire implications. EDIT
Posted Oct 29, 2020
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) Bessie Rubinstein What might Charlie Kaufman have left to tell us about men living in internal torment, agonising, for the most part, over idealised but ultimately disappointing women? According [I'm Thinking of Ending Things], the answer is "not much". EDIT
Posted Oct 8, 2020
Nomadland (2020) Esmé Hogeveen Over the course of the film, we are able to ascertain a sense of Fern's circumstances, but more specificity around her and other characters' daily struggles and successes would render Nomadland's narrative much more real and engaging. EDIT
Posted Oct 2, 2020
() Bessie Rubinstein Maybe the most interesting dimension of Justino's story is that the monkeys and man sharing space and language prompted the latter to channel his energy toward healing rather than harm. EDIT
Posted Sep 3, 2020
First Cow (2019) Bessie Rubinstein In Reichardt's unsentimental hands, though, simplicity comes not as solace but rather as an unsweetened truth: today we reap the seeds of America's poisonous past. EDIT
Posted Aug 7, 2020
Krabi, 2562 (2019) Phoebe Campion Through its meditative exploration of landscape as locus for mystery, memory and deep time, KRABI subtly unsettles the forms and intentions of ethnographic documentary and cinematic 'recovery...' EDIT
Posted Jun 29, 2020
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) Bessie Rubinstein In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Hittman lays out the stakes of a moral argument around women's bodies. EDIT
Posted Apr 16, 2020
Parasite (2019) Rebecca Liu Thinking very metaphorically may not lead to our salvation, but the consciousness it induces just might. EDIT
Posted Feb 14, 2020
Charlie's Angels (2019) Rebecca Liu There is no room for complexity, ambiguity, or thought: no space, in effect, for any interpretation that has not already been carefully spoon-fed to its audience. EDIT
Posted Jan 23, 2020
Little Women (2019) Georgie Carr Gerwig's Little Women in fact fails to engage with the proto-feminist spirit of the original, let alone the radical potential for which a modern adaptation might allow. EDIT
Posted Dec 31, 2019
Atlantics (2019) Rebecca Liu Through layered, textured storytelling, Diop explores what closure might look like in worlds where economic inequality and political violence have made such abrupt endings so common. EDIT
Posted Dec 19, 2019
Sibyl (2019) Alice Blackhurst Justine Triet's latest film, Sibyl (2019), asks refreshing questions about declining investments in psychoanalysis in a post-digital age, and chronicles how the mechanisms of late capitalism shield us from ethical complexity. EDIT
Posted Oct 25, 2019
() Esmé Hogeveen Like a magician, [director Ute] Aurand understands that the spectator's truest pleasure lies somewhere between seeing and understanding, and wisely leaves us wanting more. EDIT
Posted Oct 25, 2019
Hustlers (2019) Rebecca Liu It is a nuanced, generous depiction of sidelined workplaces and the lives of the women who work in them. EDIT
Posted Oct 2, 2019
Too Late to Die Young (2018) Bessie Rubinstein A tender portrait of children deserting their fidelity to the optimism in which they can no longer believe. EDIT
Posted Sep 26, 2019
Antigone (2019) Georgie Carr Sophie Deraspe's film adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone updates the central themes of the original -- family, exile, state power and sacrifice -- to reflect the struggles of a family of first generation Algerian immigrants in Montreal. EDIT
Posted Sep 20, 2019
Lina From Lima (2019) Katherine Connell Lina from Lima's strength lies in the ways González resists an impulse to solve or emphatically comment on the liminality of Lina's circumstances. EDIT
Posted Sep 20, 2019
The Farewell (2019) Rebecca Liu This apparent simplicity also contains emotional depth. Each frame of the family in The Farewell carries heaviness and lightness at once, indicative of the pain hidden behind everybody's performative happiness. EDIT
Posted Sep 20, 2019
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019) Esmé Hogeveen Tailfeathers and Hepburn give us a grounded interrogation of these topics. Their script, along with Norm Li's cinematography, focuses on the presence of violence as a pervasive aspect of female experience. EDIT
Posted Sep 17, 2019
Here for Life (2019) Georgie Carr Politics contains the beautiful and the mundane, the film suggests, and we should value both if we are to effectively communicate an image of the individual and their world. EDIT
Posted Sep 4, 2019
Giraffe (2019) Missouri Williams Giraffe makes no explicit judgement on what we call progress, but a sense of dread is created through contrasts between natural and artificial, green vegetation and concrete, ethnologist and builder. EDIT
Posted Aug 16, 2019
Maternal (2019) Georgie Carr Maternal makes clear that this lack of nuance belongs to the life the film depicts: the clash between two ideologies of motherhood - the spiritual vs. worldly - is culturally embedded, inescapable for the girls of the hogar. EDIT
Posted Aug 16, 2019
Animals (2019) Mary McGill Hyde reminds us that it is not only the ability to choose that counts but the quality, diversity and liberating potential of the choices available, something which, even today, continues to leave so much to be desired. EDIT
Posted Aug 8, 2019
Never Look Away (2018) Georgie Carr The film makes a strong case for the idea that a society can be judged by its relationship to art - that there is a strong correlation between artistic faculty and political morality. EDIT
Posted Aug 5, 2019
Vita & Virginia (2018) Martha Perotto-Wills Vita & Virginia is disappointing mostly because it takes one of the most beloved, influential, and strange lesbian relationships of the 20th century and makes it into something basically ordinary, a mannered cliché. EDIT
Posted Jul 11, 2019
The Chambermaid (2018) Hannah Paveck The Chambermaid exposes not only the often-occluded labour of the hotel chambermaid, but also the restricted field of agency and the precarious alignments these conditions of labour can produce. EDIT
Posted Jun 20, 2019
Heroes Don't Die (2019) Rebecca Liu [A] bold and ambitious feature. EDIT
Posted Jun 12, 2019
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) Rebecca Liu Portrait de la jeune fille en feu - a study of two women pursuing lives larger than the ones they've been given - chooses the spirit over formalism; poetry over realism; myth over history. EDIT
Posted Jun 3, 2019
Beanpole (2019) Bessie Rubinstein By concentrating on parallel reproductive drives, Balagov relinquishes the personal, turning the womb into his metaphor. EDIT
Posted Jun 3, 2019
High Life (2018) Hannah Paveck The narrative's non-linear unfolding is shot through with a strangeness that rewards repeat viewing. EDIT
Posted May 31, 2019
Madeline's Madeline (2018) Emily Watlington Madeline's Madeline explores the boundaries between representation and exploitation, a must-see... EDIT
Posted May 28, 2019
The Swallows of Kabul (2019) Bessie Rubinstein The style suits the substance. Swallows, set during the Taliban's five year regime, grapples with the ability to live meaningfully when self-expression is never without fear. EDIT
Posted May 24, 2019
A Brother's Love (2019) Rebecca Liu La femme de mon frère asks whether that waiting may in fact be life itself, and celebrates the fact that we don't have to wait alone. EDIT
Posted May 24, 2019
A Wild Stream (Una corriente salvaje) (2018) Kendra McLaughlin The non-male gaze in Una corriente salvaje accentuates the instances where machismo blurs into subtle homoeroticism that occur in Omar and Chilo's growing emotional intimacy. EDIT
Posted Apr 19, 2019
Nervous Translation (2017) Hannah Paveck Nervous Translation continually reminds us of the limits and partiality of its child perspective, even as it presents glimpses of Val's own interiority. EDIT
Posted Apr 2, 2019
Cam (2018) Annette LePique Both Mazzei and Brewer are at their best, and Cam at its most unsettling, when they explore how an economy of loneliness fuels the frightening appearance of an online double that threatens Alice's life and livelihood. EDIT
Posted Apr 1, 2019
37 Seconds (2019) Emily Watlington Even the film's title implies that the thirty-seven seconds for which Yuma did not breathe when she was born define her entire story. We learn little about Yuma that does not relate to her disability. EDIT
Posted Mar 12, 2019
The Favourite (2018) Katherine Connell Despite the empathy that actors have for their characters, the hyper ironic and self-aware stylisation gives Lanthimos a smug authoritative 'smartness' over everything depicted on-screen. EDIT
Posted Mar 6, 2019
Destroyer (2018) Rebecca Liu Karyn Kusama sketches out the architecture for an impressive epic of desire, guilt, and shame that moves the police drama past its generic, one-note and largely male roots. EDIT
Posted Feb 27, 2019
Die Kinder der Toten (2018) Hannah Proctor The evocative and sometimes visceral sound design is one of the most interesting aspects of the film. EDIT
Posted Feb 25, 2019
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Katherine Connell Can You Ever Forgive Me showcases Heller's flare for giving voice to women characters who express dangerousness and intensity through blunt humour. EDIT
Posted Feb 19, 2019
House of Hummingbird (2018) Missouri Williams House of Hummingbird is a tactile film, preoccupied by textures - of fabric, greenery, concrete, exhaustion. EDIT
Posted Feb 19, 2019
The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019) Missouri Williams The Ground Beneath My Feet is dead-on with its note of family fear, the reciprocal sickness it summons. EDIT
Posted Feb 13, 2019
An Impossible Love (2018) Gabriella Beckhurst Corsini's ending is refreshing precisely because it understands that finding sustainable ways to live in the wake of trauma aren't neatly cinched by vengeance. EDIT
Posted Jan 24, 2019
Roma (2018) Phoebe Chen However easy it is to dismiss a static or slow camera as performing attentiveness, it works - I have never looked so hard at soapsuds. EDIT
Posted Jan 23, 2019
Suspiria (2018) Rebecca Liu It is an argument that confuses stylishness with subtext and empty signifiers with intellectual heft. EDIT
Posted Dec 17, 2018
Disobedience (2017) Leon Craig The film shows the diversity within the Orthodox community and the changes that Lelio makes to the ending of Naomi Alderman's book present us with a more hopeful vision. EDIT
Posted Dec 12, 2018
Touch Me Not (2018) Emily Watlington Touch Me Not counters dominant ableist cinematic tropes that cast disabled people as asexual or undesirable... EDIT
Posted Dec 4, 2018
3 Days in Quiberon (2018) Alice Blackhurst Three Days in Quiberon refuses to freeze Schneider in rote postures of suffering and instead presents the actress as occasionally joyous, reckless, and self-aware without being self-obsessed. EDIT
Posted Nov 21, 2018