By Jonathan Monovich. Fallen Leaves implies that cinema, and the love that it fosters, saves lives.” In Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), it is said that when the thought of love and God being the same is made “suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. […]
Florid in a Good Way: Herbert Brenon’s The Spanish Dancer (1923)
By Thomas Gladysz. With a range of pictures to his credit – fantasies, adventure films, melodramas, historical epics – there are those who feel Brenon was a director without a defined, or at least a dynamic, style. There is truth to that assertion…. Adaptability, however, shouldn’t detract from an appreciation […]
A Queer Artist Hiding in Plain Sight – Counter Gravity: The Films of Heinz Emigholz
A Book Review by Rastko Novakovic. A fascinating record of the depth of Heinz Emigholz’s cinematic engagement and the evolving critical reception of it.” Heinz Emigholz started in the structuralist vein with the Shenec-Tady trilogy (1972-75): intricate, silent, mathematically composed studies of landscape. Those who know these films will be […]
Life in Pieces: Suman Ghosh on The Scavenger of Dreams
By Devapriya Sanyal. Wherever [you get] to see your product being received by such disparate audiences is a very interesting process.” -Ghosh on festival programming Suman Ghosh is a National Award-winning Indian filmmaker who has made six feature films and one documentary film. His first feature film was Footsteps, starring Soumitra […]
A Bloated Beauty: Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Here is a filmmaker who remains unafraid of taking big creative risks but has clearly struggled with the ethical implications of adapting this dark chapter from American history. His heart is in the right place, but is he not still on that stage at the end?” […]
Different Types of Love: An Interview with Todd Haynes on May December
By Ali Moosavi. I think on the one hand love is the way we enter into relationships which organize and structure our lives and come with the society either condoning of those choices or social opposition to them…. But also Roland Barthes the French writer and theorist wrote a lover’s […]
The Surveillance Economy of David Fincher’s The Killer (2023)
By David Ryan. The Killer argues that no matter how much security wealth buys or the number of datalocks that conglomerates build, these defenses can be poked and usurped by determined criminals. Conversely, no matter how clandestine criminal cells are organized, they can be destroyed, particularly from within.” Spoiler Alert […]
The Essential is (In)visible to the Eye: The Human Figure on Film
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. Author Seth Barry Watter discusses four interlocking, yet separate modes of looking: the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional. Each comprises a specific way of seeing, explains the author, whereby we select and assign different concepts to our constructions of knowledge, meaning, […]
Never Change: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023)
By Thomas M. Puhr. A portrait of how the celebrity machine thrives on packaging and preserving its subjects as doll-like children who are denied the luxury of developing discernible inner selves.” The opening chords from Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” accompany an overhead shot of two pristinely pedicured feet creeping along […]
Making Of, The Pulse, and Others on the Side: Selections from the 80th Venice Film Festival
By Ali Moosavi. Gabrielle: I still get eaten up. Vincent: Yes, but you get the shot! –from On the Pulse The side sections of the major film festivals often offer works that are as interesting, or sometimes more interesting, than the films in the main section. Here are a few […]