Short Review for Selected Films:
<SIRAT> by Oliver Laxe: Rolling dice with God. Since Apocalypse Now, this is the first time someone has truly ventured deep into the wasteland again—battered, blistered, and only upon closing their eyes do they find a way out, only to return with nothing, mysteriously and inexplicably. It defies categorization, and bears no trace of the familiar routes taken by auteur filmmakers’ usual approaches. Laxe’s brilliance lies in the swift, almost weightless transition from the real to the transcendent—like the flick of a light switch. Perhaps in the future, some of its gestures could be carried out with more confidence and conviction. The desert here is both a metaphor for annihilation and for rebirth. A towering work—the best in competition in the past three years.
<EDDINGTON> by Ari Aster: The meaningless allusions to BLM and mask freedom amount to little more than a hollow reenactment of political strife, devoid of direction or precision. If America’s most potent posture during the 2020 election was indeed that of “Parasite” and “Joker”—a cynical, nihilistic outburst against chaos—then in the Trump 2.0 era, every term used to critique the left, the mob, and BIPOC must be scrapped and redefined from scratch. Still delighting in the spectacle of staged storms, Eddington all becomes proof of Ari Aster’s complacent existence within an echo chamber, untouched by real consequence of reality. Cults, the wife’s sexual trauma, the hollowness of campaign slogans, the fabrication of public discourse—not a single thread is followed through.
<LA NOUVELLE VAGUE> by Richard Linklater: Still, it was quite an enjoyable viewing experience. Rather than being made for cinephiles or as an act of homage, it feels more like an introductory course to auteur cinema for teenagers who dream of picking up a camera one day—just as I, freshly out of high school, was mesmerized when I first watched Boyhood.
And yet, in doing so, it fundamentally deviates from Godard himself and his ideals. Even as the film is saturated with his famous punchlines, it treats Godard merely as a symbol of cinematic revolution rather than engaging in any real dialogue with his ideas. But then again, you have to admit: the very nature of revolution is to be misunderstood, to make the “untransmittable” transmissible. In that sense, Linklater has already fulfilled his mission.
<HIGHEST 2 LOWEST> by Spike Lee: Genre storytelling merely provides momentum, while the true protagonist of the film is the potent bloodstream and genetic spirit of Black culture.
It’s not only an accidental inversion and confrontation between high and low social positions, but also a living encyclopedia of a people’s movement from the margins toward the center.
Neighborhoods, subways, slang, basketball, baseball, women, brothers, and sons—we see with absolute clarity how New York is stitched together and sustained by such tides of ambition, triumph, and loss.
When the police, bound by procedure, make no headway, a swift street-side message sets in motion a far more effective pursuit—one carried out not by the system but by the individual.
Street and system, highest and lowest, hell and heaven—never have their connections felt more living.
And this is the brilliance, the undeniable allure, of the African American experience: a continual ascent from below to reach the top, but the top constantly nourished by that very same “below,” always ready to return.
Just as Washington can slip off a suit and throw on a hoodie, it is a beautiful system of dialectics.
<HISTORY OF SOUND> by Oliver Hermanus: A film this outdated, moldy, and putrid in 2025 is simply astonishing. After just one scene together, the characters would start having sex, and within two more scenes, we're fast-forwarded to their breakup. The so-called chemistry between Mescal and O’Connor has nothing to do with love or attraction—held together solely by professional commitment and almost a sense of martyrdom.
The film’s supposed centerpiece—its sound collecting and musical choices—is barren to the level of preschool music education, and by the end, you can visibly witness the collapse of its conviction. An insult to queerness, to music, and to cinema itself—nothing short of a cultural garbage bin.
<SENTIMENTAL VALUE> by Joachim Trier: Perhaps the most resolutely actor-centered film since Mia Madre, this work reaffirms how theatrical labor—"performing" and "re-enacting"—can confront, expose, and even rescue endangered individuals and near-collapsed family bonds, even when those very crises were themselves triggered by the same labor. In a household submerged in intergenerational trauma, each member ultimately finds salvation through "playing" one another—an act that becomes self-redemptive. For theatre, after all, is an exorcism by way of possession: it fills real absences with fictional reunions, a beautiful yet sorrowful paradox.
This rare ethical vision finds its fullest expression in Fanning’s character, whose honestly admits to failure after giving her all to inhabit a role—she steps back. And the director receives this with grace, without interpreting it as a failure. It’s a dual affirmation—of the performer in real life, and the role in the fiction—that reveals what sentimental value truly means.
<RESURRECTION> by Bi Gan: What a grand and romantic time-traveling reverie it was—one that drifted through both the best and the worst of times, all within the same era. Perhaps most remarkable is that, for once, a mainland Chinese film dared to truly fictionalize. Even more extraordinary: it broke free from the heavy shackles of realist suffering, choosing instead to imagine within the narrative of an era—under the most exalted spotlight, flinging open the floodgates of imagination. The wings that caught the wind beat upwards, defying gravity.
Who says that in the opium dens of the smoky late Qing, at bombed-out wartime train stations, or on the gangster-infested streets of the new millennium, we cannot have stories deeply entwined with history, yet so lightly and romantically personal that they slip into the cracks between grand events? In nighttime alleys boy and girl chase and hide, hurt and love one another—and after one song, dawn breaks. The journey at daybreak also marks the end of entanglements. In long takes, in time-lapsed light, we endure until sunrise. Such cinema, such a dream machine.
