Dreams

Meaningless, interchangeable single-word titles have become my biggest pet peeve of contemporary cinema, but of all the terribly named features to be instantly forgotten six weeks after their release, strictly because their writer, director, producer, studio, or distributor couldn't be bothered to come up with a halfway decent moniker, let alone a creative one Dreams is the worst. "Dreams," are you fucking kidding me? Do you know how many movies in the last twenty-five have the title Dreams? This isn't even the American title of a foreign-language film; this is the title. How can people work so hard and spend so much money creating a film only to send it out into the world with a moniker that virtually guarantees it will be forgotten within weeks if it even gets seen at all by more than a handful of people at a festival? Honestly, I could write five more paragraphs about this rather than reviewing the latest surprising film from the director of After Lucia, Sundown, and Memory. What's Memory, you ask? I don't have a clue because a film with a name as generic as Memory somehow didn't make it onto the radar of a guy who saw something like eight films a week that year.

Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco always tackles issues from a unique angle. In his latest, Jessica Chastain plays a wealthy socialite whose family foundation sponsors a ballet company. She becomes romantically involved with a Mexican dancer (Isaac Hernández) whom she's befriended and tried to help obtain a visa to perform with the company. Her privilege and indecision lead to some bad outcomes, to say the least. Franco plays with cultural stereotypes and archetypes in ways that feel calculated, but what he does with them and where he takes them feels both unexpected and earned. Chastain and Hernández have a terrific, uneasy chemistry in a film that explores class and gender power dynamics in most unexpected ways.