Pacifiction
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2h 45m
Directed by Albert Serra | 165 mins | 2022
Serra’s mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat’s (Benoît Magimel) visit to a French Polynesian island charts the uneasy relationships between his autocratic yet avuncular High Commissioner and the Indigenous locals under his faux-benevolent thumb. With anxieties recently flamed by rumors of the return of nuclear testing by the French government, the Catalan filmmaker’s slow-building, hypnotic fever dream surfaces incisive commentary about the remnants of colonialism through quiet observation, jaw-dropping shots, and sheer aesthetic audacity.
Up Next in All Films
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Palmipedarium
Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 10 mins | 2012
Clapin followed up his acclaimed short "Skhizein" (2008) with this wordless and unsettlingly ambiguous fable about a boy who encounters a scraggly avian creature while duck hunting with his father. It’s a short whose placid surfaces belie a latent, buddi... -
Peppermint Candy
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea... -
Playback
Directed by Sho Miyake | 113 mins | 2012
With a perceptiveness beyond his years, Miyake moved from the adolescent unquiet of his feature debut, "Good for Nothing" (2010), to the unquiet of looming middle-age in his follow up. Soon to be divorced and almost 40, Haji (Jun Murakami), an actor, takes...
