Review by Andrew Swafford

Laberint Sequences takes as its subject a hedge maze in Barcelona, making of it a filmic structure appropriately labyrinthine. Through the slightly graying blur of Williams’s chosen set of glasses, the film presents its audience with varying vantage points of the maze in no discernable order until the film begins looping back on itself. I counted 2-3 revisits of the opening image before I got the impression that every trip through the maze was unique, and that the viewer wasn’t so much restarting but moreso going deeper with every go-round. 

Review by Andrew Swafford

In The Royal Hotel, Kitty Green’s follow-up to The Assistant, the monsters are everywhere. This, too, is a film about institutional rape culture, but of a kind far less insidious and clandestine. Set almost entirely in a rowdy bar that serves as a central watering hole for a remote Australian mining town, The Royal Hotel depicts sexual harassment against women at its most casual and flagrant, with all manner of unwanted attention and aggression shrugged off with “I was just being nice” or “it was just a joke. In the world of this film, catcalling, misogynistic slurs, and physical violation is so normalized as to become almost blasé, and the one woman who attempts to push back against this everyday violence (Julia Garner, again), repeatedly finds herself dismissed or outright targeted in response. While The Assistant exposed a single machine from the point of its smallest cog, The Royal Hotel attempts to tackle the full breadth of sexual harassment experienced by women from a bird’s eye view, and the resulting story is more schematic than compelling.

Review by Andrew Swafford

Walking into The Boy and the Heron was a little surreal: I couldn’t believe I was getting a chance to see a new film by Hayao Miyazaki. Perhaps the greatest animator in film history, Miyazaki is in his eighties and has announced his own retirement numerous times – and the last time, it felt real. The Wind Rises, released ten years ago at this point, was a profoundly melancholy film, a bittersweet reflection on a storied career that could only have been made by a great artist with a complicated relationship to his own work. It felt less like a typical Studio Ghibli fantasia and more like something Miyazaki needed to get off his chest: a personal admission to his audience that making art on an industrial scale comes with a moral cost. It was personal and powerful, but more importantly it felt final; it was a film that felt intended to be a filmmaker’s last film. What could possibly follow it?