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One Week (1920)
Marriage is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all package, as Buster Keaton so amusingly illustrates in his silent short One Week, demonstrating a level of comedic genius in his architectural inventiveness, creative framing, and wildly physical stunt work that explores the unique cinematic potential of visual comedy in the early days of film.
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A Short Film About Killing (1988)
The vision of Warsaw that Krzysztof Kieslowski presents in A Short Film About Killing is a barren wasteland of mud and shadows, strained through a sickly, jaundiced filter that unnervingly reveals the truly grotesque horror in justifying the malevolent destruction of human life.
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The Souvenir Part II (2021)
If its precursor was an examination of a young filmmaker’s first love, then Joanna Hogg counterpoints that in The Souvenir Part II with a thoughtful, autobiographical study of her first major loss, deconstructing the artistic and grieving processes with a keen meta-awareness and sharp compositional eye.
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The Souvenir (2019)
There is a quiet frustration in seeing haughty intellectual Anthony emotionally manipulate ambitious film student Julie in The Souvenir, and although it is clear which one Joanna Hogg holds more affection towards, her autobiographical self-reflection on toxic young love takes a touchingly nuanced understanding of the matter in its gentle pacing and affecting character work.
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Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
The three days we spend within freshman Jake’s microcosmic college bubble seems to stretch out in eternal bliss, a period which Richard Linklater delights in with richly defined characters lightly treading the line between hedonism and intellectualism, evolving Everybody Wants Some!! into an unhurried study of Generation X masculinity in all its youthful idealism.
