Two Seasons, Two Strangers—which won the Golden Leopard at last year's Locarno Film Festival, and more recently played Lincoln Center and MoMA's New Directors/New Films—is a diptych adaptation of two stories by cult manga figure Yoshiharu Tsuge, “A View of the Seaside” and “Mister Ben of the Igloo.” Miyake realizes these works through the eyes of screenwriter Li (Shim Eun-kyung), whom we first see trying to put pen to paper before we slip into the world of her movie, which follows two young people as their lives intersect at an island resort.
Steven Soderbergh has a certain superpower, not always bestowed on even the most important directors: a capacity to surprise. This is a restlessly productive film-maker, travelling light creatively, developing eclectic projects, shooting on digital, using intimate locations and getting the very best from an invariably classy cast. He has recently found himself in the UK and his latest London-set movie is terrifically exhilarating and funny, as bracing as a large vodka and tonic before lunch: fast, literate and funny with a key plot progression elliptically and unsentimentally managed.
For someone best known as an actor, Bradley Cooper's core interest as a filmmaker is perhaps unsurprising. Thus far, he has been entirely consumed by examinations of performance-first digging into a pop musician's stratospheric career climb in A Star Is Born, then wrestling with Leonard Bernstein's desire to reimagine classical music in . Both movies were hefty pieces of entertainment, filled with love, death, and grand human experiences. His newest, the fetching
Though I haven't loved all their films, Norwegian director Joachim Trier and his writing collaborator Eskil Vogt remains among the hopes of the medium-an accomplished team whose work is intelligent, involving, thematically ambitious but very human in scale. Their latest Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and it again largely revolves around Renate Reinsve, the star of their last effort The Worst Person in the World.
Her shaggy, '70s-set film starring Josh O'Connor as the orchestrator of an art museum robbery gone wrong, channels the kind of shaggy '70s capers that defined the genre - without any of the sleek, satisfying results of a heist flick. Instead, The Mastermind feels more true to the sinuous core of '70s neo-noir like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye: meandering, pensive, and melancholy.