‘In Between Dying’ Venice Review: Compelling, Offbeat Road Azerbaijani Movie Produced by Reygadas

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticOpening this year’s Emmy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel told the audience — the one at home, given that there was no one sitting before him in the stands of the Staples Center — that there were a great many moving parts in piecing together the ceremony. He asked, mordantly, “What could possibly go right?”It turns out: Quite a bit.

Composed of a series of striking tableaux, Gianfranco Rosi’s contemplative documentary, “Notturno,” mines the intergenerational conflict on the borders between Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Maggie Lee Chief Asia Film CriticThe devil is in the details in “The Dark and the Wicked,” a horror film that teases out the evil presence descending on a grieving family on a Texas farm, with the same ambiguous, psychological heft of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” Writer-director Bryan Bertino’s slender script translates into a low-humming, allusvie narrative (punctuated with occasional gore) of tingling terror.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThere are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there is “Good Joe Bell,” a uniquely terrible treatment of an important topic — broadly described as “inclusivity” and “tolerance” by the film’s wild-eyed protagonist (Mark Wahlberg) — whose hubristic title is the first clue that it’s not playing fair. Joe Bell was a man like any other, who attempted to turn tragedy into a teaching moment.

Unfurling an entire life of failed artistic ambitions in the span of a two-hour film, Chaitanya Tamhane’s remarkable sophomore feature “The Disciple” is decidedly leisurely in its approach. Executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Tamhane’s film centralizes the world of Hindustani classical music, in which singers perform an improvised raga, modulating their voices depending on the singer’s emotional state.

Choose your fighter: Orson Welles, recently back in LA after a decade of European exile, and embarking on a project so meta he will emulate the film’s director-protagonist and die at 70 never having finished it; or Dennis Hopper, mere days after the end of an 8-day marriage, struggling to edit the metafiction that will kill his directorial career for nearly a decade? The documentary, “Hopper/Welles,” cutely credited to Welles as director, but put together by “The Other Side of the Wind” producer

Inching forward on a rocky if deeply felt cinematic path that has rarely strayed far from reflections on himself and his mother, Azerbaijan filmmaker Hilal Baydarov opens up his vistas, somewhat, in the fiction feature In Between Dying (Sepelenmis Olumler Arasinda). It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.

In almost no way does Chloé Zhao‘s quiet, enormous, deep breath of a movie, “Nomadland,” resemble “Blade Runner.” Except there’s this one moment: an outstanding speech in a film as attuned to vast wild silences as to conversation. Fern (Frances McDormand) is talking to her friend and fellow nomad Swankie (played, like many of the other roles by the real person on whom she is based).

“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Beydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Beydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.

Serious discussions on the perpetuated correlation between race and class in Mexico have dominated the country’s collective consciousness over the last few years. Cinema has actively participated in such reckoning, but never before as boldly as in Michel Franco’s “New Order (Nuevo Orden).” Bound to be contentious at home for its brutal depiction of a not-so-implausible and not-so-distant dystopia, the auteur’s latest shocks with blistering purpose.

So somebody somewhere one day had a thought: “What if ‘Die Hard’ except a school shooting?” and not only didn’t they immediately check themselves for other symptoms of lead poisoning but thought, “Yep, that’s a winner” and went on to make the movie.

Mining the well-worn tropes of the crusading journalist, Jing Wang’s “The Best is Yet to Come” is an investigatory look at Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic.

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

Films dealing with reproductive rights don’t often announce it in the title. But “ Unpregnant ” is not a by-the-numbers entry into this genre and it is not coy about its subject matter.

The indie drama “Topside” opens with a startling image: a five-year-old girl sleeping on the ground with a beam of light shining on her from above. She’s underground living in the tunnels of New York beneath the subway system and she’s awoken by workers with flashlights.

Ed Meza @edmezavarCelebrated Azerbaijani filmmaker Hilal Baydarov has won international acclaim for a fast-growing body of work that has included seven films in the past two years while also attracting high-profile collaborators.Baydarov is making his Venice debut with the competition title “In Between Dying,” a film he produced with Elshan Abbasov and co-producers Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films and Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and his Splendor Omnia Studios.

June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over.

An audacious what-if scenario lies at the heart of Regina King‘s poised, well-crafted but conceptually conflicted directorial debut, “One Night in Miami,” a high-minded drama that plays as an all-star real-life Black superhero team-up: What if newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay, singer Sam Cooke, NFL record breaker Jim Brown and a Malcom X on the cusp of breaking with the Nation of Islam, spent the pivotal night of February 25, 1964 sparring, bickering and mutually inspiring

Close your eyes and imagine what Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” would evolve into if its tone were more uplifting than unsettling and its protagonist wasn’t preying on humans but trying to heal them. That new material would remain a film about a mysterious entity coming into a foreign land, or planet, and peculiarly engaging with its inhabitants—who may never unearth the origin or exact motivations of their unannounced guest.

There are many kinds of documentaries one might want to see from “I Am Greta,” a Hulu portrait about famous teenage Climate Change activist and eco-warrior Greta Thunberg. One might hope for something akin to “The Inconvenient Truth,” with tons of sobering statistics and easy-to-understand graphs and charts led by the passionate teenager (you won’t find that here).