Dream Team
Contemporary Cinema
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1h 32m
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 93 mins | 2024
Making films together since 2004, Kalman and Horn have developed and refined a style that’s entirely their own, an idiosyncratic blend of ethereal synth-scored reverie, deadpan absurdist humor, sly sociopolitical observation, and genre-bending play. Their latest is an outrageous, visually sumptuous, more than slightly surreal homage to the ’90s late-night cable erotic thriller—structured as seven “episodes,” with individual credit sequences and titles like “Asses to Ashes"—starring Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai as two INTERPOL agents tasked with investigating a mysterious death in Mexico who find themselves contending with fitness freak interns, sultry scientists, a psychic network of coral reefs, and their own smoldering desires. An oddball oneiric delight.
Up Next in Contemporary Cinema
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Dry Ground Burning
Directed by Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós | 154 mins | 2022
In the Bolsonaro-era Brasilia of this incendiary two-hander—the second collaboration between directors Queirós and Pimenta—political resistance takes the form of an all-women gang who steal and refine oil before selling it on to bike... -
Ema
Directed by Pablo Larraín | 107 mins | 2019
Unlike some of the Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín’s tortured heroines—namely Jackie Onassis, Princess Diana, and most recently Maria Callas—the fictional Ema, the electric, bleach-blonde dancer at the center of this crackling drama (Mariana Di Girolamo), ... -
Exhibition
Directed by Joanna Hogg | 104 mins | 2013
Two married, childless fifty-something artists (Viv Albertine of the Slits and Liam Gillick) share an austere modernist townhouse and a crushing sense of ennui in Hogg’s third feature, a study in second-nature cohabitation that’s as precise in its rigorou...
