Josef Gatti tells us little that we don’t already know in “Phenomena,” and that’s pretty much the point. In his first feature-length documentary, the Australian takes a seductive, hyper-sensory approach to the kind of educational filmmaking that any sixth-grade science teacher would be glad to use as a classroom aid — and in so doing, makes fundamental facts of the universe seem once more beguilingly mysterious to us. Using a combination of simple home experiments and intricate analog filmmaking, Gatti physically illuminates the forces of nature (energy, gravity, entropy and so on) that we often mistakenly think of as impalpable.
Related Stories
Gatti may
→ Continue reading at Variety
