Sometimes a film takes me by surprise. Young Adam is very good—a moody, atmospheric portrait of dead-end lives, with moral overtones drawn from Dostoievski. But in the world of David Mackenzie’s film, from a novel by Alexander Trocchi, no redemption is possible. There is no New Adam.      It is a full film, this, with claustrophobic […]

“Turtle Dreams” superimposes a turtle on top of a map of the world, more likely dreaming of extending its mobility rather than of military conquest, to which human dream in other films such movements across a map conventionally refer. Nevertheless, the turtle, exceedingly vulnerable underneath its shell, is like an army tank; and the turtle’s […]