By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Rosenblatt’s documentary is a frank self-assessment that resituates an otherwise easily forgotten misstep of youth in the context of the knowledge and experience of adulthood…. [while] When We Were Bullies strips away the soft surfaces of nostalgia to remind us with a near visceral intensity of the […]
Environmental Factors: An Interview with Filmmaker John Andreas Andersen on The Burning Sea
By Anees Aref. I wanted the environments to feel real and the people to feel real. As a director it’s a chance to take, because the audience is so used to seeing there has to be a bad guy, to create the classic conflict there has to be some idiot. […]
A “Spiritual Comedy”: An Interview with Jöns Jönsson on Axiom (Berlinale 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. It’s always very hard to put these labels on films. It’s easier to come up with new labels that didn’t exist before, and that is why I call the film a spiritual comedy. There is humor in it. There are absurd and funny situations. And adding thriller? […]
Big, Bold, Brazen: The Batman
By Elias Savada. For those of you who wondered if another reboot could find itself an audience after Christopher Nolan did such a fine job with his trilogy, please wonder no more….” Nietzsche would have a field-day analyzing the latest reimagining of DC Comics’ masked vigilante. (Bat) Man might not […]
A Creative Hunger: Actor/Writer Kelly Murtagh on Shapeless
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. The tone does feel hard to put into words, I think, because Shapeless is so experiential…. Eating disorders can seduce, seeping in subtly, promising relief. You fall for it, just one time. And then another….” “Lived experience” is increasingly becoming one of those descriptors that overuse is […]
The Prison House of Privilege: Pablo Larrain’s Spencer
By Christopher Sharrett. A portrait of female disintegration to a point that [the film] has been termed a horror film, an extreme designation, but not wholly inaccurate.” I saw Spencer at its opening, but I’ve waited to comment on it until I could view it carefully on Blu-ray, such is […]
A Disaster Waiting to Happen: The Burning Sea
By Anees Aref. An activist film that also works as a solid piece of entertainment.” What would it be like to watch a pending natural disaster, only seeing it now, that is? That’s the feeling one gets watching The Burning Sea, a timely new Norwegian film directed by John Andreas […]
Enchanting But Overstuffed: Brian Petsos’s Big Gold Brick
By Elias Savada. Petsos likes to mix some old-fashioned, heavy-handed whimsy with oddball characters, then sprinkle in a ton of exuberance. Maybe too much.” You might recognize the name Brian Petsos, but most of you are thinking “Who?” After watching his feature directorial debut Big Gold Brick, you might be […]
Against the “Purity Laws of Cinema”: An Interview with Isabelle Stever on Grand Jeté (Berlinale 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. The gender concept is now so flexible. And that, I find quite appealing. The not quite so ordinary thing in this film is that here a woman is the perpetrator, and the story is told from her perspective and this perspective remains unpunished.” German director Isabelle Stever’s […]
A Birth Raising Social and Moral Dilemmas in Iran: Until Tomorrow (Berlinale 2022)
By Ali Moosavi. Asgari has delivered his most accomplished socially aware thriller.” Ali Asgari made his name in cinema by making short films. These films were often co-written or co-directed with Farnoosh Samadi and won many awards at various festivals. These successes did not go unnoticed by the US Academy […]