J. Hoberman is a recovering film critic.
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STATE FUNERAL (Sergei Loznitsa)
The official footage documenting the pageantry around Joseph Stalin’s death—reorchestrated here by Loznitsa—is a totalitarian spectacle that, in its interplay of leader and mass, is a sort of found Triumph of the Will starring a “dead god” (Loznitsa’s phrase) in a carnation-red coffin. The Trial (2018), another Loznitsa film, might serve as a prologue—long-lost footage from an early show trial that was evidently shot for an audience of one still-living god.
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MARTIN EDEN (Pietro Marcello)
Bursting with ideas, Marcello’s brilliantly disjunctive adaptation of Jack London’s quasi-autobiographical novel about an uneducated sailor’s stubborn self-reinvention as a freelance writer is a mad, brawny character study as well as a cheerfully anachronistic meditation on Italian political history.
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SYNONYMS
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