I.S.S./Pictures of Ghosts | 2024
I.S.S. and PICTURES OF GHOSTS.
I.S.S. (Gabriela Cowperwaithe, 2024)
An interesting premise is undone by lackluster execution in Gabriela Cowperthwaite's I.S.S., a film about what happens on board the International Space Station when a global conflict breaks out on Earth between the United States and Russia. The once-friendly astronauts representing the two countries suddenly find themselves catalysts for a war they knew nothing about; each asked to take over the space station for their respective countries by any means necessary.
For a premise that seems rife with tension and intrigue, I.S.S. is almost unbearably talky, its characters spending inordinate amounts of time handwringing and not enough time doing anything interesting. The whole thing is so dramatically inert, trying to weave in backstories for the characters to provide emotional depth, but it feels either forced or half-hearted. Everything about I.S.S. feels strangely lethargic, even as the confrontation starts coming to a head. Cowperthwaite wisely illuminates very little about the conflict happening down on Earth; we remain just as in the dark as the astronauts, but the conflict on the space station isn't nearly strong enough to make up for it. It's a potential slow-burn thriller that never even bothers to get warm.
GRADE - ★½ (out of four)
PICTURES OF GHOSTS (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2024)
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest film, Pictures of Ghosts, is a lovely and elegiac exploration on the profound effects of the filmmaker’s childhood neighborhood and its cinemas on his films, and the endless march of time's effects on them. I often found myself thinking about Agnes Varda's Daguerreotypes and Tsai Ming Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn in the way Filho examines the power of cinema to preserve while also using it to document its own death; faded movie palaces now replaced by towering high rises, replaced by ramshackle churches, the temples of cinema swapping one religion for another.
It's such a deeply personal elegy for something lost to time, preserved by the medium that gave it life. These ghosts, these memories, haunt every frame, inspiring something new and beautiful, the seeds of new trees fertilized by the carcass of the old oak. Filho deftly blends truth and artifice, documentary and magical realism, to create something uniquely beautiful. A memory, a shadow, a sketch, a half-remembered dream, a changing cityscape, and an ever-shifting culture moving ever forward, for the briefest moment frozen in time.
