overview
Las Vegas is what you make of it. Hollywood makes it into a place of speedy, jacked-up risk. Nina Menkes is an American Filmmaker with no interest in that Vegas. Hers is a place of great expanses of dry earth, smudged blue sky, flat lakes, lonely people and incongruously garish or claustrophobic interiors. Queen of Diamonds is about moods, the Old Testament, death, marriage, hazard and how we watch images on a screen; it is only tangentially about a black jack dealer whose husband is missing.
Menkes, who once photographed Bedouin people in the Sinai, has an eye for compositional drama and a sense of pace that couldn't be more opposed to Hollywood time, which assumes viewer impatience. (...) Maintaining the integrity of a radical experimentalist with the resources of fine-grain 35mm film technology, Menkes may be on a course to making an unprecedented kind of cinema. Queen of Diamonds is a step in that course.