Call him Nostos. The name of the ancient Greek who attempts to make his way home after many, many years at war in Franco Piavoli’s astonishing Nostos: Il Ritomo means homecoming. Call him Odysseus if you like, or Ulysses.      Nostos’s single-minded aspiration to get home accounts for the film’s unity; its continuity, though, is in […]

Faintly, we only hear bookending sirens, barking dogs. At least at the outset of Dana Rotberg’s Angel of Fire we do not know what has happened. Ambiguous, dark, allegorical, this film from Mexico takes us into its world.      The small Circo Fantasia draws few patrons, and mostly unresponsive ones. About the profits, the owner speaks: […]