By Elias Savada. Yes, there’s a theatrical cadence in the clever dialogue, but it’s such a highly original, suspenseful piece that it works magic as the characters move about their set.” Leonard Burling is a quiet, sad-eyed, precise, and observant man – an old-school, Savile Row cutter by trade, with […]
Embracing Multiplicity: Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs (Laila Aur Satt Geet)
By Varsha Ramachandran. The pace, while slow, is steady, ensuring reflection without boredom, something to which the beautiful frames, colour combinations, and lilting score also contribute.” Director Pushpendra Singh’s second film adapting Rajasthani writer Vidaydan Detha’s works, The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs, which premiered at the 70th annual Berlinale, […]
Hard Times – Big Bad John: The John Milius Interviews
A Book Review by Matthew Sorrento. Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” John Cheever, “Goodbye My Brother” And what can we do with John Milius, a writer-director so stubbornly Right-wing in his views: do we urge viewers adamantly to embrace or to resist him? He’s undoubtedly […]
Worlds of Tiny Pain: On Laura Wandel’s Playground and Jay Rosenblatt’s When We Were Bullies
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 […]