100 Words on Aneesh Chaganty's Run (2020)

By Thomas Puhr

Run (2020) works best when director Aneesh Chaganty focuses on his heroine, Chloe (a revelatory Kiera Allen), a disabled young woman who suspects something is not quite right with mother. Consider a beautifully-composed set piece in which Chloe escapes her locked bedroom, shimmies across the roof of her house, and reenters through another window, only to end up breaking back into the same bedroom to retrieve her inhaler. Chaganty’s ironic, Hitchcockian sense of space aside, Run fails to escape one of the genre’s most infuriating tropes: nearly all of its secondary characters (a pharmacist, a postal worker) are cartoonishly stupid.

100 Words on Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (1994)

By Thomas Puhr

Despite its formidable runtime, Sátántangó (1994) is the antithesis of an epic. Tarr's patient, precise camera circles - like the spider web to which the narrator often refers - around the same handful of characters and events, revealing the complex network of perspectives behind even the simplest of moments. 

The villagers’ stories are reduced to a few pages, crammed in a locked bureau among countless forgotten records. The government workers file their report. The drunken doctor boards up his rainswept windows. 

Do the bells ring again or for the first time? What did Irimiás (Mihály Vig) see in that fog?

100 Words on Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life (2019)

By Thomas Puhr

Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter (a steadfast August Diehl) is imprisoned and executed for refusing to swear loyalty to Hitler. Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) captures this true story with the reverent awe it deserves, and the writer-director’s visuals are as gorgeous as ever (though their impact is blunted by repetition). As has often been the case with latter-day Malick, A Hidden Life is simply too long: a good three-hour film that could have been a great two-hour one. I can’t help but wonder what Badlands-era Malick (or at least a more discerning editor) could have done with this material.   

100 Words on Nicolas Pesce's The Grudge (2020)

By Thomas Puhr

High on atmospherics but low on the strong characterizations that marked his previous films, Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge (2020) proves that not even a young, gifted director can resurrect this stale franchise. While there’s much to admire, including some striking compositions and genuinely upsetting set pieces, the writer-director leans far too heavily on cheap scares copied from previous installments. A convoluted narrative structure of overlapping timeframes prevents any emotional engagement. Perhaps most egregious is the underused supporting cast (John Cho, always excellent, doesn’t get nearly enough screen time). Ultimately, Pesce’s formidable talent behind the camera fails to overcome reboot constraints.