During a time when most mainstream movies seem to run around thirty minutes too long, it’s refreshing to see features that can pack a full story into a brisk running time. Ted Fendt’s feature debut Short Stay clocks in at just over sixty minutes, and still manages to tell a complete—albeit somewhat lackadaisical—narrative about a generic guy living a generic life.

Similar to Kevin Smith’s famous debut Clerks, Short Stay is a slice-of-life character study about Mike (Mike MacCherone), a perpetually bored twentysomething whose job at a local pizzeria isn’t providing him with the excitement he desires out of life. When a friend of a friend offers him a job giving tours of Philadelphia, Mike reluctantly moves out of his Jersey apartment and takes the job, thus beginning a new chapter in his mundane life. Of course, the move doesn’t change the man’s outlook on life, and being a timid loser frequently results in Mike being walked all over by coworkers, roommates, and potential love interests. The feel-good movie of 2016 this certainly is not, but it’s still a film worth watching.

One of the more interesting plot points in the film revolves around Mike’s attraction to a girl who assures him that she’s in a relationship but values his friendship. It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out exactly what’s going to happen next, and while the film doesn’t offer any significant swerves on that end, watching the whole uncomfortable disaster play out is quite entertaining. Mike’s troubles with the ladies are somewhat relatable, but mostly just sad. The scenes in which the poor bastard tries to overcome the problems in his love life evoke secondhand embarrassment in ways that very few films can.

It’s all photographed on grainy 35mm, mirroring the haziness of Mike’s life. Opting for a documentary-like aesthetic, Fendt and cinematographer Sage Einarsen seem determined to capture aspects of real life, and they frequently do so. Reminiscent of mumblecore films from the mid-2000s, Short Stay is comprised of long takes, what appears to be improvised dialogue, and consistent naturalism. There are no action-packed set pieces or larger than life plot points but the film still entertains in spite of this.

Some members of the supporting cast aren’t exactly convincing, delivering lines with little believability and the charisma of a wet sock. This is somewhat routine in these kinds of films, but it still detracts from the experience. Naturalism simply doesn’t work when those performing it don’t come across as natural. MacCherone, however, portrays the mousy protagonist in successful fashion. He’s a total loser, admittedly, but Mike is a generally easy guy to root for. It seems as though his entire goal in life is to not be a complete and utter failure, but he just doesn’t know how to succeed. In that regard, Fendt’s feature debut is thoroughly depressing, but the tone is actually comedic. There aren’t any “jokes,” per say, but the strange manner in which Mike handles all of his problems is laughable in the right way.

Films like Short Stay are an acquired taste, and can justifiably be viewed as both brilliant and lazy, depending on individual perspective. Evoking shades of the early works of Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass Brothers, there should be little doubt as to what kind of cinematic experience Short Stay provides. The film does exactly what it sets out to do, and that’s always something to be appreciated.

In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, filmmaker and film historian Peter Bogdanovich recounted a conversation he once had with Golden Age Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart. In the conversation, Stewart, while speaking about making movies, said, “… then what you’re doing is, you’re giving people little … tiny … pieces, of time … that they never forget.” It’s a great quote that has stuck with me since I first read it, and I was reminded of it while watching the excellent new documentary Cameraperson.

The film comes from director Kirsten Johnson, who has been a cinematographer on more than 40 documentaries since 2001. The pieces of time she presents are truly pieces of time from her life: dozens and dozens of cinematic moments she has shot over the years. But these are not solely excerpts from the films she’s worked on; these are clips of when she rolled film to test lighting, scout locations, discuss shots with her directors, experiment with camera angles, and even just footage of her own family she shot at home, too. Assembled in no chronological order, there are no mentions of the original films the clips are associated with. It’s an effective tactic, as it takes the focus away from “Look where this scene is from,” and moves it to, “Look at this scene.” Johnson presents the clips only with title cards to indicate the geography of the moment, and what geography it covers, globetrotting from Bosnia to Brooklyn, Gitmo to Nodaway County, MO, and everywhere around and between.

At first, the presentation seems so random. There’s an early scene of a boxer in his Brooklyn locker room, preparing for a big fight. In the next scene, a midwife aids in the delivery of twins in Nigeria. These two worlds could not be further apart geographically or thematically, and yet they aren’t necessarily ripe for direct contrast, either. Johnson leaves those scenes where they are and moves onto others, and then patterns start to emerge.

Men in Herat, Afghanistan are connected to a troupe of young ballerinas in Colorado Springs, CO, who are both connected to Johnson’s own family in Beaux Arts, WA, all by a theme of religion. This segues into the theme of how death is approached by connecting another documentarian, a spokesperson for the Syrian Film Collective, and the prosecutors of a murder trial in Jasper, TX. Many other patterns take shape in this manner as the film progresses.

The scope of it all is what’s so amazing about Cameraperson: how themes of life, death, faith, crime, childhood, parenthood, government, joy, and sorrow intersect, overlap, and intertwine across time and around the globe.

This film isn’t the work of a director who has an idea for a documentary and decides to gather new footage or mine soundbites to make what they want. This isn’t someone, for example, who wants to showcase the looming specter of governmental distrust, and in doing so shoots scenes at Guantanamo Bay, adds a Washington, DC interview between a documentarian and a Marine willing to go to jail to avoid a second tour of duty in the Middle East, and caps it off with a shot of a mysterious thumb drive being entombed in fresh cement at an undisclosed location. This is a filmmaker who shot scenes at Gitmo in 2010 for one story (Laura Poitras’ The Oath), in DC in 2004 for another (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11), and at an undisclosed location in 2014 for a third (Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour).  Johnson then combines her pinpoint eye for filmmaking with her broad eye for history to illustrate how the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s breathtaking in both ambition and execution.

Edited with great skill by Nels Bangerter (whose work on Jason Osder’s Let the Fire Burn is must-see), Cameraperson has such a great variety of entries that everyone will surely have a favorite subject, even when that subject is taken on its own merits and not looked at as part of the greater whole. My favorite? Two, actually: the boxer and the midwife from the start of the picture. How Johnson concludes their individual stories is supercharged with raw, genuine emotion. How she connects the two tales is visionary.

Cameraperson is a dazzling example of storytelling in its purest form—being observed, not told—and every little piece of time she gives us is time well spent.

Cameraperson screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

Clocking it at well over five hours in length, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour isn’t so much a character study as it is an entire character course. Following four women in their late thirties as they attempt to deal with their individual relationship troubles, the film is filled with relatable struggles and honest, emotional performances, but ultimately becomes a victim of its own ambitions.

Having been best friends for many years, Jun (Rira Kawamura), Akari (Sachie Tanaka), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), and Fumi (Maiko Mihara) have formed a nearly unbreakable bond together. They meet up frequently to gossip about their lives and air their grievances about their currently living situations. Having all been married at one point, their ideas about a woman’s place in a marriage differ. After Jun reveals a shocking secret about her own marriage, her friends have mixed reactions, adding a strain to their friendship.

Above all, Happy Hour is a movie about infidelity and how it affects not only those in the relationship but their acquaintances as well. Knowing that your friend is committing adultery is a tough spot to be in because it leaves a choice between loyalty to a friend and a commitment to doing what’s right. Adding to the complexity is the discovery that the infidelity involves a mutual friend, which is a major issue explored in Happy Hour. The results aren’t over-the-top or cinematic in any way. Instead, they’re deeply rooted in reality. All of the events feel as though they could happen tomorrow, which has its pros and cons as a filmmaking technique. It certainly adds to the realistic tone of the film, but it prevents the movie from being particularly exciting. Happy Hour certainly isn’t boring, but it lacks a frenetic energy.

The defining aspect of the film is the almost unheard of running time, which wouldn’t feel nearly as gratuitous if many scenes didn’t come across as unnecessary filler. As human as it is, there are a significant amount of scenes that could be trimmed down—if not eliminated completely—without the film losing any effect. One early sequence finds the protagonists attending a pseudo-spiritual workshop where they participate in borderline cult-like team-building exercises. After ten minutes, the point is made—the women’s personal problems mirror the teacher’s lessons in a Boy Meets World kind of way, albeit much more mature and existential—but the scene continues on for much longer. Hamaguchi seems determined to beat certain ideas into viewers’ brains, despite establishing them successfully in the first attempt. In a way, it seems as though he isn’t completely confident in his ability to express certain ideas, even though his ideas are quite strong.

The four leads deliver naturalistic performances that make their already empathetic characters all the more believable. Engaging in numerous, lengthy conversations about both nothing and everything, it’s almost impossible not to see aspects of your own friends in the women. They’re complex, generally likable, and extremely relatable. They discuss mundane aspects of everyday life with the same enthusiasm as more existential concepts involving their uncertain futures. Thankfully, these conversations are generally entertaining, considering the film is almost brutally dialogue-heavy. It’s not just a film with a lot of talking—it borders on being a film about talking.

At times, Happy Hour is a strenuous watch and a pretty tough sell, given the over five-hour commitment needed to experience it in full. However, if you do commit to viewing the film, the payoff is there. The characters are fully developed and fascinating, and their story arcs are engrossing in ways that few are. It lacks many of the qualifying themes to call it an “epic,” as there are no colossal set pieces or big action sequences—or action of any kind, really—but there is a strangely “big” feel to the film. It’s a heavy drama, thick with human emotion, that could benefit from being just a bit more brisk. Perhaps in the future, Hamaguchi will consider creating a similarly engaging feature that is much shorter in length.

When looking at a festival like New Directors New Films, a question comes to mind: what should be expected from a first film? There are plenty of cases where a director’s first outing can produce a stunning masterwork, but it would be absurd to put those expectations on every single debut. It might be best to look at first features, especially within the context of a festival like ND/NF, through a bigger scale rather than scrutinizing each title on its own merits. Sometimes a first film can establish a new, distinctive, and underdeveloped voice, showing off filmmakers brimming with a potential that might not be fully realized just yet.

From what I’ve seen at ND/NF this year, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits feels like an ideal film for this festival. It starts out with a shot of Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old girl doing push-ups in a boxing gym. She goes to the gym with her older brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor) every day after school so he can look after her, and while her tomboyish looks suggest she enjoys being surrounded by so much masculinity, it soon becomes apparent that she would rather be doing something else. One day, she discovers an all-girls dance crew practicing nearby and immediately gets hooked, signing up despite having no experience with dancing.

Holmer sets her film up as the story of an alienated youth but relies on form and texture to establish Toni’s feelings of isolation. The visuals and sound design represent Toni’s heightened perspective on the world, and without using much dialogue, Holmer lets viewers pick up on her protagonists’ internal issues through the film’s rigid and well-defined style. Using static shots, shallow focus and off-kilter framing (along with a great score from Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans), Holmer and cinematographer Paul Yee create a tone that reflects Toni’s detachment from both the world of the boxing gym and the dance crew (a personal favourite: the way Holmer frames a group of boys at the gym going to town on a pizza, making them look more like animals fighting over a meal).

And as beguiling as Holmer’s film might be, it isn’t always effective. The detached vibe sometimes makes Toni too vague and undefined to understand what she might be feeling within a specific scene, a feeling that can make The Fits seem like it’s missing something that can elevate it into something truly special. That almost comes when Holmer introduces a mysterious plague that starts causing girls in the dance group to suffer intense seizures, an affliction that Toni seems to be immune to (which only contributes further to her feelings of solitude). The tonal shift doesn’t do much to address the film’s more opaque qualities, but it does make some of Holmer’s themes—like the fear that comes with entering adolescence—more resonant.

Still, even if The Fits doesn’t coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, its flashes of greatness (of which there are many) certify Holmer as one to watch. On a moment-by-moment basis, The Fits remains compelling, and at several points Holmer achieves a synergy that combines form and content into something truly singular. It’s the sort of film that frustrates in a good way, making you wish it lived up to the immense amount of promise brewing just underneath each frame. Whether or not Holmer’s next project lives up to that promise remains to be seen, but I know that I’ll be eager to see whatever she does next.

Almost as long as there has been teen angst, there have been films about teen angst. From Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause  to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, and including many in between and since, the teen angst film has been a moviemaking staple for six decades, offering insight into what teens go through during each film’s point in time. In most cases only the details change, as higher level themes of disaffection, identity crisis, and peer pressure have been common teen problems for generations. But those details are important, and can drive just how good a film is.

Kill Me Please is set in an affluent section of present-day Rio de Janeiro, where a clique of bored teenage girls finds titillation in a series of murders—murders that happen to be of other teenage girls. Facts are at a minimum but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill from grinding out plenty to quench their morbid fascination. As the body count rises, 15-year-old Bia’s (Valentina Herszage) obsession with the crimes and their victims grows too. Teens are still teens, though, and there is plenty else for them to cope with as they go about their daily high school lives.

The opening scene of Kill Me Please is terrific, showcasing the harrowing demise of a teenage girl whose only crime was walking home alone at night. Panic leads to pursuit, which leads to the girl’s final, fearful gaze into the camera and her piercing, dying screams. Neither the killer nor the girl’s blood is ever shown. The sequence is all atmosphere and adrenaline, recalling the openings of slasher flicks from the 1980s, and it’s an opening that will grab viewers from frame one.

With the opening gambit established, the film settles in, introduces its players—Bia, her girlfriends, her slacker brother João (Bernardo Marinho), her boyfriend Pedro (Vitor Mayer), a few other students—and delves into the daily drama of the young, rich, and beautiful, with diversions into the darker side of life with every new victim.

There are several films that come to mind when considering Kill Me Please. Its horror strains invoke thoughts of Brian de Palma’s Carrie; its beautiful and privileged teens having their lives jolted by death, and how reactions to death vary from teen to teen, harkens to Michael Lehmann’s Heathers; and João Atala’s lush and colorful cinematography calls to mind Benoît Debie’s lens work in Spring Breakers. Unfortunately, this film is nowhere near the level of any of those.

The problems begin early on, when the film doesn’t know when to stop settling in and eventually becomes stuck in a rut. Writer/director da Silveira parts ways with the slasher film motif (and all its promise) to handle things like character development and plot, of which there is very little. The teens’ lives include the expected, like sexual awakening, competitiveness in the athletic arena (handball), petty jealousy, passive/aggressive body shaming, religion, and rival cliques. These are all part of creating, wrestling with, and solving teen angst. The problem is how lifeless the characters are. Kids meant to be regarded as soulful or introspective instead come across as apathetic bores. Even Bia’s growing obsession with the murders never takes on any kind of intensity; it’s only an increased interest.

Because the director never returns to the intensity of his opening sequence, subsequent victims are shown after their demise, not during, or they’re simply talked about (save for a montage of their faces late in the film, only proving the dead were just as beautiful as the living). Some might consider this to be a less is more approach, but that sense is never conveyed. The murders are cold, distant events that lose all gravitas because they are talking points about murders, not the actual murders. The fact that there are adult characters in the film is an interesting and gutsy choice, but it strains credulity as the body count grows since no police ever show up.

Kill Me Please is a gorgeous-looking film that ultimately falls victim to its own narcissism, relying on its aesthetic so heavily that the function of its story is mostly an afterthought. After squandering an excellent beginning, it never recovers to offer a satisfying finished product.

Kill Me Please screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

I love a good ghost story, so when I read the synopsis of first-time writer/director Zhang Hanyi’s Life After Life—a description that included the spirit of a deceased mother possessing her son—I was all in. While I didn’t quite get what I bargained for, what I got wasn’t bad. It’s a ghost story for sure, but one unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Mingchung (Zhang Minjun) and his son Leilei (Zhang Li) are walking through the forest gathering fallen sticks to use as kindling in the fireplace that warms their home. After a brief spat between the two, Leilei sees a hare race by and gives chase. He’s gone for several minutes and when he returns, he is Leilei only in body; his spirit has been replaced by that of his late mother, Xiuying. Using her own voice, Xiuying asks her widowed husband to return to their previous home, dig up the tree she planted in the front yard (a gift from her father), and replant it somewhere safe from the industrialization that is growing and will eventually lay waste to that old land. Mingchung dutifully obliges, at first attempting to recruit help but eventually doing it himself, with Leilei/Xiuying’s help.

The setting, which Hanyi and cinematographer Chang Mang magnificently capture in wide static shots with sharp details and an achingly muted palate, reflects a barebones Chinese countryside forever skirting the edges of industrial sprawl. The land is mostly dead, but the sense is that the death is not some hibernation demanded by the wintery season; instead, it’s the earth’s terminal state of complete surrender to the assault it is under.

The film’s characters are not much different. Repressed by dreadful socioeconomic conditions, Mingchung and those whom he attempts to recruit to relocate the tree are distant, unemotional, and devoid of personality or excitability. If no one is phased by the notion that Xiuying has returned in the form of her own son’s possessed body, then it comes as no surprise that no one is phased at the site of a man suffocating a goat. That’s a level of repression that borders on abused. It might also explain why Mingchung can’t get the help he wants since nobody cares.

And yet buried deep within these doldrums are sparks of hope. Xiuying, at least in spirit, is back with her husband, and she gets the opportunity to see her parents one last time. This offers hope for an afterlife and a way back for those so inclined. And at one point, Xiuying alerts Mingchung that his deceased parents have since been reincarnated—one as a dog and one as a bird. It’s absurd to the point of being funny, although the constant hum of misery stifles any laughter.

Then there is, of course, the love story. It isn’t overt or sappy, nor is it traditional, but it’s there in the form of Mingchung taking on this massive task rather than not rejoicing in his late wife’s temporary return. He didn’t have much of a life, but the life he had was put on old to make her happy one last time. He seals the deal with a devastating monologue late in the film, where the reason for her demise is revealed and his regret surrounding the circumstances and the aftermath come to light. It’s never elaborated on, but their meet-cute must have been something special.

Life After Life, with its foreign arthouse sensibilities, its glacial pace, and its chasms of silence between sparse lines of dialogue, is a film that dares you to dislike it. And yet I didn’t. In fact, I found it quite hypnotic. I also found it rather sentimental, given the task at hand for its protagonist and who’s responsible for sending them on their journey. It isn’t a perfect film, and it won’t be for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a shot.

Life After Life screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.