By Theresa Rodewald. Unconventional and even daring while not appearing to be so.” “I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” writes poet Siegfried Sassoon […]
5 Billion Hours: Daisuke Miyazaki’s Videophobia (Kani Releasing)
By Thomas Puhr. Despite some striking imagery and a strong central performance, Videophobia never exceeds a low boil.” Daisuke Miyazaki’s Videophobia (2019) begins with an extended masturbation scene. You’d think such an opener would – at the very least – grab the viewer’s attention, but the sequence somehow lands with […]
A Pompous Pageantry of Moviemaking: Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna
By Jeremy Carr. Doesn’t hold a candle to Gaspar Noé’s best work, though it does represent the worst of his occasionally strained attempts for shock and awe.” With no establishing context and following a few curious quotes and seemingly random clips from early films about witchcraft, Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna […]
Combating Islamophobia in the US: An Interview with Nausheen Dadabhoy on An Act of Worship
By Ali Moosavi. We’re all carrying so many years of this trauma and so the film for me is really about helping our community acknowledge that this happened but also how we should heal from it.” Ever since 9/11 Islamophobia in the West, in particular USA, has been on the […]
Counterfeit Money: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Great Swindler (aka The Confidence Man, 1964)
By James Slaymaker. The Great Swindler deserves to be recognised as a major work that sheds light on Godard’s attitude towards technology, critical reflexivity, and the shortcomings of the classical documentary mode.” Considered as a whole, Jean-Luc Godard’s filmography may be read as a reflexive historiography of the transforming technologies […]
Eye on (and Off) the Ball: William Klein’s The French (1982)
By Thomas Puhr. Beyond just chronicling an event, Klein’s sports doc is a cultural artifact in and of itself – not about the time, but of it. With this year’s French Open making the rounds on the news, now is an ideal opportunity to revisit the tournament’s famous 1981 competition, […]
Hearth of Decades: Achal Mishra on The Village House
By Anees Aref. The germination of the idea comes from the house [on location]…. It’s also my hometown, that village, and I’d been photographing that landscape for the last five, six years. I think [the film] came from the photography that I was doing of that landscape across different seasons. […]
From Burundi with Cyberpunk: Neptune Frost
By Elias Savada. A vibrant celebration of homegrown culture set against an African dreamscape tinged with Marxist underpinnings.” Thou Shalt Not Exploit Technology might be one of the newer commandments to be considered after inputting this new, unconventional avantgarde piece, a self-proclaimed cyberpunk musical filmed in Burundi. It played at […]
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: Fernando Ayala’s The Bitter Stems (Los tallos amargos, 1956)
By Jeremy Carr. The imagery of Los tallos amargos is not only its most strikingly noirish attribute, but it’s among the more dazzling of any film, of any genre.” A cursory survey of film history would seem to suggest that Hollywood had cornered the market on the best of what […]
The Real Genius: What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? by Joseph McBride
By Tony Williams. Despite McBride’s fortune in having a closer involvement with Welles than most critics, this book is never reverential. Instead, it presents a balanced and complex picture of an extremely talented but difficult personality whose personal flaws are less important than what he attempted to achieve.” What Ever […]