China Sea (2025)Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

A fighter accidentally injures another fighter and is blackballed. Left with no place to fight he returns home and finds life complicated.

This is a dark sad drama that is going to leave you broken at the end. No one and nothing is spared (that is a spoiler/warning). There is a reason why we never see sunshine and that is because there is no daylight for anyone in the film. A coproduction between Lithuania and Taiwan the film has the bleakness that you can only find in Eastern European films. It's so dark I had to try it a second time because the first attempt at watching it depressed me so.

This is cinema as gut punch. It's a film that grabs you by the eyes in the open moments and puts you in a place that stays with you for days. Its a place you will be glad that you are only visiting. This is a film that is set among the people who don't realize how deep in hell they are.

That, my friends is a rave. 

This is a brilliant one-of-a-kind film, and I want to never see it again. I can't say much more because I need to get out of the film's headspace.

I have no idea what director Jurgis Matulevičius has done before but I want to see everything.

A must see.

A pointer toward Devil's Bride (1974) Fantasia 2025

The Eastern Block nations were making some weird ass films under the rule of the Soviets. I don't mean that in a bad way, more that there are some truly bizarre film that came out during the Cold War, especially in the 60's, 70's and 80's. I mean no one in Hollywood would turn out a musical folk tale about the devil ending up in a romance after getting pitched from heaven. The music is fully of fuzzy guitars and  music thts similar to Jesus Christ Superstar except not up to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

God bless Deaf Crocodile for bringing this film to the masses. This is a one of a kind viewing experience that is going to delight anyone who wants off Hollywood films. This is going to confuse others. And it will annoy the hell out of anyone who wants typical Hollywood product.

I do not know if this qualifies as a good film. I don't know if I like it as a film. I don't know if that matters. I do know that I loved the experience of watching. I loved the weird twists ans turns and not feeling like I knew where this was going. This is an experience and an eye opening film about the world and cinema.

If you want something that isn't like anything you've seen before- give this film a shot.

DROWNING DRY (aka Seses aka Sisters) (2024) NDNF 2025

When I saw that Laurynas Bareiša's follow up to the excellent PILGRIMS was at New Directors New Films I got excited. I was even more intrigued when I realized that it also had been short listed as Lithuanian entry for the Oscars.

The film is very hard to discuss.  The film is about two sisters and their families who go to a remote cabin and something happens. What happens at that 36 minute mark is not immediantly clear and the film spends the next hour bouncing through time and replaying some events as we see what happened after in fragmented form. How you react to the film is determined by the pieces that are thrown our way. Because the trip is required to get a fair reaction I can't tell you more regarding details.

I will say that with this second cinematic foray Bareiša has taken a step toward being recognized as a crafter of fine human dramas. The characters are compelling, the situations feel real. There is a sense that for the most part this is happening right before us.

I will also say that I'm not so certain that the fragmentary telling of the tale really works. I say that because the fragmentation implies something greater than what we get. I wish the film had played out chronologically and that what happens happened without the broken narrative. The strength of the directors earlier film was the fact that it played out like life with no grand revelation promised nor given. Here the shift from straight forward to chronological muddies the water needlessly.

That isn't to say it breaks the film. It doesn't. It just makes what would have been a near great film into a solidly good one and that is enought to recommend it when it plays New Directors New Films.

Burial (2022) CIFF 2022

Meditation on how we are going to handle dealing with hiding away the nuclear waste we produce. Focusing on a reactor that is a large twin of the one at Chernobyl which is being cut apart and buried we are left to ponder the enormity of the project and what the future brings.

This is a haunting film about the dangerous garbage we create.  Focusing on making us see what the places look like where we mine uranium and turn it into electricity, we are forced to wonder what we are doing to our environment.  Not much is said, we are simply told things by titles on the screen. This is a film focused on making us feel and think.

I've seen several films on what to do with nuclear waste over the years, indeed one of the first films I covered for Unseen at Tribeca was INTO ETERNITY about trying to design a storage facility that would remain safe for millennia. Most of the films faded from my head not long after seeing them. That isn't the case with BURIAL. In the 24 or so hours since I saw the film before I wrote it up I was haunted by it. The images came back to me and I wanted to revisit it not just because I wanted to reengage with what it was telling me but because the visuals are so striking.

Highly recommended, especially if you can see it on a big screen.

Pilgrims (2022) NDNF 2022

 

Is a solid drama.  It’s a bit low key and as such it may not appeal to everyone but for those who connect with it it is a nice little character study.

The film concerns Paulius who is the brother of Mateus. Mateus was murdered four years ago and he still hasn’t gotten over it. Traveling with Indre, his brother’s girlfriend at the time of the murder, he seeks to reconnect with his brother by revisiting the places, and people, his brother touched in the last hours of his life.

Let me be up front, there are no grand revelations about the events. What I mean by this is this is not a whodunnit, we know who did it and they were tried for the crime. What we are investigating is the interior landscape of the human heart. How does the was heart try to fix itself when it is broken. This film tries to figure that out.

This is a quiet little drama which has a big impact if t clicks with you. If you like a film where how someone acts and moves says as much as what it spoken this film is for you. I say that because there were a couple of times when I was taken aback by a look or a gesture which seemed to say more than the words. Both Giedrius Kiela and Gabija Bargailaite are wonderful.

I really liked this film a great deal. In a festival where the head is more often  tickled over the heart, it was nice to have a film that moved me.

Isaac (2019) Sundance 2021

Opening with a stunning single take tracking shot of a massacre during the Second World War this is the story of a man who participated in killing. 20 years after the war, when the Soviets control the country, he returns to Lithuania to work on a movie based on the massacre. Unfortunately  the KGB suspects that the man's seeming detailed knowledge of the massacre may mean that he committed war crimes and a game of cat and mouse begins.

You'll forgive me if I don't go into a lot of details on the film, its simply that what makes this film so special is the ride. This is a film where the story is only part of the experience. This is a film where the experience of seeing the film, of seeing the twists and turns  playing out that adds to the enjoyment of the film. As a result, until you experience the film I can't really explain it to you.

Know that this is a magnificent work of cinema this is a film that anyone who loves the craft of filmmaking will fall in love with. This is a film that uses every trick imaginable to craft an edge of your seat ride. Its one part historical drama, one part thriller and one part Kafkaesque tale. Its a film that not only tells one hell of a story but it creates a killer head space and feeling.

Highly recommended.

The Lawyer (2020)

Gay Lithuanian lawyer Marius drifts from relationship to relationship. Not long after his father dies he meets Syrian refugee Ali who works as a sex-cam worker. There is a connection but there are complications.

This is a good little drama/romance  the complications of  being LGBT refugee. More importantly it is just a solid romance that manages show the complications that exist in real world messy relationships and not the typical happily ever after Hollywood arc.

One word of warning, despite being a Lithuanian film, most of the film is in English. While that made it easier  to watch than reading subtitles I think it also resulted in some uneven line readings. The poblem is not leads Eimutis Kvoščiauskas and Dogaç Yildiz who are both excellent, but from some of the others are better than others. It created a sense of unreality for me since I know that outside of this being a movie not everyone would be speaking English all the time.

Quibble aside THE LAWYER is a good little film and worth your time.

The film is out on DVD on August 18 via TLA Releasing. It debuts exclusively on SVOD on the Dekkoo streaming platform on Aug. 20, but it will roll out on major TVOD platforms in the Fall. On Aug. 24, it will screen in a theater for the general public for the first time at the 49th edition of the Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival in Ukraine

Ragnarok (2017)

One of the most impressive animated shorts of 2017 and even longer concerns an eagle flying into a storm and trying to find a safe haven.

Full on allegory hits one in the gut. While the end isn't intellectually perfect it is emotionally and it hits you like a ton of bricks.

A mix of stop motion and computer animation this thing is simply arresting. It almost literally took my breath away as the sound and image created such incredible emotion....

....and that sound design - holy moley- I have not heard anything quite like it in any film in a very long time- it deserves every award you can give sound people.

Ragnarok is highly recommended and easily one of the best films of 2017 at any length.