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Best no-budget aerial footage: Norte, The End Of History
Norte, The End Of History, Lav Diaz’s four-hour yarn about guilt and transcendence in the modern-day Philippines, is the director’s most accessible work to date. (Accessibility is, of course, relative, especially when it comes to filmmakers best known for making nine-hour-long movies on black-and-white consumer-grade video.) Part of that is owed to the presence of an honest-to-God director of photography, Lauro Rene Manda. Shot in 2.39 widescreen, in color, and marked by long takes and glacial camera movements, Norte is easily the most conventionally handsome thing Diaz has ever put his name on. It comes as something of a shock, then, when the movie abruptly breaks its rigorous style for a dream sequence composed of no-budget aerial shots—seemingly produced by attaching a GoPro to an RC plane—that hearken back to Diaz’s handmade roots and yet look like nothing he (or any other narrative filmmaker) has done before. Camera-carrying, gimbal-mount quadcopter drones have made inroads in TV production in the last couple of years (expect to see them showing up in movies soon), but the effect Diaz achieves is rawer, and more in keeping with the spirit of the scene. It feels like an unmoored consciousness, hurtling over the landscape.

The full list is here.

The A.V. Club review: “Contemporary festival-circuit culture fetishizes long takes, but Diaz actually earns them.” Note: Wakwak is the psycho played by Soliman Cruz. The reviewer means the convict who is periodically released to do assassinations for politicians, the one who says “Ang buhay ay sumpa.”

Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan is showing on Saturday, July 19, 630 pm at Greenbelt 3 and Trinoma and on Sunday, July 20, 3pm at Alabang Town Center and Glorietta. Tickets at sureseats.com.