![]() Whatever the nature of his existence, Denis Levant is excellent as Mr. Oscar? Is he an angel? An actor? Is he in hell? ![]() It’s also wonderfully impenetrable in its approach: who is Mr. Holy Motors is a beautiful and often bewildering film that meditates on identity and persona and the metaphysics of interpersonal relationships. ![]() Undeterred, he returns to the limo and goes on to his next appointment, where he’s an old man on his deathbed being consoled by his niece–but they both excuse themselves from the scene because they both have their next appointments to get to… Then at his next stop he guns down a banker and is soon after gunned down himself. But in between some appointments, he has a meeting where another man enters his limo and lets him know the others are worried that Mr. At one stop, he’s an old beggar woman on the street, and the next an actor in a motion capture suit performing a few scenes.Īt his next stop he kidnaps a model, and then he’s a father picking up his daughter in a car from a party. Oscar has a strange job, if you can call it that: driven around Paris all day in a white limousine, he goes from location to location inhabiting different characters. You’d never think you’d get so emotionally invested in a character that looks as rudimentary as a child’s drawing but Hertzfeldt’s endearing signature style and serious tone of the film transcends its simple trappings to become a work of art and a philosophical reflection of our own existences. Originally released as three separate short films, It’s Such a Beautiful Day reflects upon the ongoing existential crisis that life can be and concludes on a sad but poetic note. ![]() To give more of it away than that is to ruin the impact of the film, but for such a straightforward movie it has a great cumulative effect on the viewer once it ends. Bill, a simply drawn figure who wears a fedora and seems like a nice enough guy, wanders through his life a little confused and scared, especially when he finds out he has a tumor in his head. This is a bleak outlook and the worldview animator Don Hertzfeldt details in It’s Such a Beautiful Day.įollowing the increasingly dark life of everyman Bill, this minimalistic animated film is the story of his life–or at least the bits and pieces he remembers. For a filmmaker with a little imagination and a lot of ambition, the market’s wide open and receptive to new ideas–as these selected films will attest.įrom a certain viewpoint, life can seen as a blunt affair: you’re born, many cruel things happen to you even though you only want nice things to happen, many people leave you either by choice or by death, you grow old, and eventually you cease to exist–and then life continues on for everyone else. ![]() We live in a golden age of cinema because the audience has never been wider and the possibilities of film have never been easier to attain, even those with a limited budget. The ten films recommended in this list were widely hailed upon release (and one that’s been widely reviled but still a strong recommend for reasons that will be detailed below) but have somewhat lost either their initial promotional shine or whose momentum simply petered out before a wider audience could hear about it to watch and marvel at their unique charms. With internet and VOD streaming services having finally caught up to deliver theater-quality video, there are more outlets than ever to watch film and but also more titles for a movie to get lost among. The New Tens continue the trend of experimentation, genre mixing, and innovations that the film world began to heavily produce in the 2000s, and with the new and unseen quickly becoming de rigeur for emerging filmmakers to test their mettle and stand out among the increasingly crowded field of indie filmmakers, this decade has been an exciting one for cinephiles so far.īut with innovation and a wide-open market comes the potential to quickly fall into obscurity: what was hailed by critics as a bold film upon release is soon lost in the constant torrent of new work being produced at a seemingly record pace. ![]()
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