I’m still not sure if this is the greatest film I have seen since Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (2007). It just might be. I will know for sure when I watch it again this week. The stunning images from a two-month trip across the Atlantic on a freighter—the slowly swaying and creaking ship, the continents of clouds, the unearthly endlessness of the sea—which were shot and composed by the film’s director, Mauro Herce, who is also a cinematographer, might be loved and mean even more this time around, now that I long for a powerful escape from the horrible political world I have found myself in. Dead Slow Ahead aestheticizes and even dehumanizes the mega-machine. Humans made these massive objects. They dwarf us and have a godlike presence. We worship and love our mega-machines. They might save us one day. by Charles Mudede