Friends of Metrograph Nathan Silver, Rachel Handler, and Natalia Winkelman each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Nathan Silver selects
The Tsugua Diaries
The Tsugua Diaries, dir. Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, 2021
Maureen and Miguel made the only film about lockdown I need. It manages to squeeze joy from early Covid living, throwing it on the screen for our pleasure somehow. I know this sounds implausible, but hear me out. Just put on the song that bookends the movie: “The Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. You’ll understand what you”re in for. Miguel was already becoming one of my favorite living filmmakers when I went in, but this helped cement that status. The sense of humor, warmth, and playfulness are alone enough to make the work notable, but add in the sly (yet absolutely essential) structuring device, and you have something magical. What is August backwards? It is what you should watch right now.
Nathan Silver’s films have screened around the world, including Sundance, Berlinale, MoMa, and La Cinémathèque Française, with Four by Nathan Silver currently streaming on Metrograph At Home. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing his latest, Between the Temples.
Rachel Handler SELECTS
The Headless Woman
The Headless Woman, dir. Lucrecia Martel, 2008
This movie feels like-and quite literally is about-getting a medium-grade head injury. It’s deeply unsettling, disorienting, and mysterious, touching on guilt, class, delusion, death, morality, bad hair dye, incestuous family dynamics, and why you should get the fuck off your cell phone. Martel demands your undivided attention here, you concussed fool, and if you don’t give it, you will be the wrong amount of confused. Every frame is packed with layers of visual information and rich metaphor; every blurry background movement is meaningful; every expression that flits quietly across the face of the incredible Maria Onetto or bit of overheard dialogue is integral. Though it’s ostensibly centered on an upper-class Argentinian woman named Vero (Onetto) who hits something unknown with her car and finds her life and mind slowly unraveling, the movie is most alive in its corners, where seemingly insignificant childhood dramas play out, where moms gossip about contaminated swimming pools, where ignored household servants exchange pointed glances, where ghosts briefly shimmer. Quotidian and banal, harrowing and haunting all at once, this is a movie that teaches you how to watch movies and how not to drive.
Rachel Handler is a features writer at Vulture and New York Magazine who covers movies, TV, music, and pop culture. She was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2020.
Natalia Winkelman selects
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011
A film haunted by binaries: life and death, of course, but also light and dark, expanse and confinement, hinterland and cityscape. This sixth feature from Ceylan follows a cavalcade of law enforcement officials as they traverse the Turkish hills in search of a dead body. But like limestone eroding to reveal ancient carvings (one bas-relief face appears in the film), the story eventually gives way to an absorbing psychological study. Come for the chiaroscuro and tableaux, stay for the meditation on what it means to be human. Did I mention it’s also very funny?
WATCH ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
Natalia Winkelman is a film critic based in Brooklyn. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Boston Globe.