Slow West
They are odd fellow travelers: Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Silas (Michael Fassbender) together on the trail in this melancholy Western odyssey. Jay is a youthful idealist, an émigré who imagines that he’s in the land of hope and opportunity; Silas sees a darker world populated by cutthroats. He’s a bounty hunter whose prey is the lost love Jay seeks. The highly stylized dialogue is intriguing in this quirky debut by British director John M. Maclean.
Soldate Jeannette
Some critics call Fanni (Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg), the protagonist of this film by Austrian director Daniel Hoesl, a rebel—even if she’ s really a delusional sponger forced by her own ineptitude to abandon her life of conspicuous, politically correct consumption. Soldate Jeannette won an award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on the strength of its heavy-going Teutonic humor, which surveys the banality of life at the top as well as the low end of society.
If You Build It
The purpose of shop class has always involved building practical skills. For activist-designers Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, shop can also be a means to rebuild a community. After the school board of Bertie County, N.C., eliminated their salaries, they continued teaching a class whose ambitious final project might help reverse the area’s decline. A century ago the Bauhaus believed that design could change the world. In a more modest way, Pilloton and Miller agree.
