Neon Bull

Winning prestigious festival prizes at Venice, Toronto, Rio, and Warsaw, Neon Bull further refines Mascaro’s sensual, remarkable examinations of how characters’ desires are formed by—and rebel against—natural environments. Iremar is a handsome cowboy in the rural, arid backlands of the Brazilian northeast. Although he works on the traveling rodeo circuit, he dreams of being a fashion designer thanks to a recent textile boom in the region.

The beautiful, memorable cinematography by Diego García, whose work you can see in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor at the Wex this March, brings all of the tumultuous desire and repression out of the natural landscape and the bodies—human and animal—that inhabit it. The result is a surprising, erotic, and loving portrait of changing 21st-century masculinity. (101 mins., DCP)