‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Review: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Wry, Wistful Doc Ponders What We Lose When Our Picture Palaces Go Dark

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic “I love downtown Recife,” narrates Kleber Mendonça Filho over self-shot footage of his hometown’s dilapidated center, its once-promising clusters of midcentury high-rises now graying and under-occupied.

He admits that he considered cutting that line from his voiceover, deeming it redundant, before letting it stand: “You should say when you like someone.” In “Pictures of Ghosts,” a stirring, idiosyncratic ode to the city — and cinemas — that raised him, the Brazilian filmmaker duly wears his heart on his sleeve, raking through the domestic and public spaces that made him the artist he is today, and making his affection and gratitude for them known.

In so doing, he remembers the larger communities sustained and abandoned by an evolving national cinema culture, making for a documentary that feels acutely, even eccentrically, personal, but never navel-gazing.

You can see why Mendonça Filho might have felt he didn’t need to restate his feelings for Brazil’s fourth-largest city: His first two features, 2013’s “Neighboring Sounds” and 2016’s “Aquarius,” also functioned as complex valentines to Recife, a place somehow in a simultaneous, symbiotic state of progress and decay, both overrun by noisily echoing urban activity and haunted by absence where one way of life has made way for another.