"Liverpool", de Lisandro Alonso (The Auteurs)

"Like his debut feature, Los Muertos (2004), Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool (2008) is a work of rugged solitude, executed with a careful simplicity of unhurried, unbroken, and generously distanced shots," writes Ed Halter for Artforum (whose new, September issue is up today, by the way).

"Like people in a Jacques Tourneur ghost story, Alonso's creatures seem to exist in separate planes that overlap without quite connecting, a sense of disconnection which here extends from loner to community," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Formalist yet visceral, monosyllabic yet eloquent, Liverpool ponders the lure and absurdity of nests in a world of unending, faraway ports."

For Andrew Schenker, writing at the House Next Door, "Liverpool is so focused on stripping its screen of anything but the most banal actions and so committed to eliminating even the slightest show of expression from its characters' faces that at times it seems like there's nothing left to the film except a series of artfully rendered compositions. It's within these compositions themselves, though, that Liverpool's meaning is to be found, even if, taken cumulatively, their effect remains maddeningly diffuse."

Michael Guillén had a good long talk with Alonso last week - and he links to a few more interviews as well.

See also: Reviews from Cannes 2008, Michael Sicinski's take from Toronto that September and Quintín in the November 2008 issue of Sight & Sound, where Maria Delgado spoke with Alonso.

Liverpool screens at Anthology Film Archives in New York for one week starting tomorrow and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on September 17, 19 and 20. At the Edge of the World: The Cinema of Lisandro Alonso runs at Seattle's Northwest Film Forum from November 11 through 19.