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
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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... -
Exit Elena
Leaving February 1
Directed by Nathan Silver | 72 mins | 2012
One of the great under-the-radar debuts, Silver’s sly comedy drops a twenty-something nursing aide (Kia Davis) into a suburban house where her kibitzing employer—played by the director’s scene-stealing mom—keeps drawing her into drama...