By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Agnes shrewdly balances sincerity with the filmmaker’s signature style of camp once again to extraordinary effect.” I’m not even three minutes into the international premiere of Agnes at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest and I almost had to be physically restrained from hugging the screen. All the things I […]
An Arthurian Fever Dream: David Lowery’s The Green Knight
By Elias Savada. Patel’s explosive performance pushes this fever dream of a film into award-worthy contender territory.” Mythical fantasy has met its latest fan, and his name is David Lowery. Yes, he’s aptly called a visionary filmmaker, one who likes to ambitiously spin genres on their heads. He loves to […]
Dream Tax and Video Visions: Inside Strawberry Mansion (Fantasia International Film Festival)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. While certainly not everyone’s bucket of fried chicken, is a wildly creative reflection of life, love and the real threat of losing our souls – and our dreams – to the corporate, capitalist machine.” Premiering earlier in the year at Sundance and making its Canadian premiere at […]
Stillwater: Sub-Par McCarthy, with Damon as Everydad
By Elias Savada. I pray that Stillwater is just a blip on the director’s stunning career. I wish that I could recommend this latest film from director Tom McCarthy, whose first feature, The Station Agent, remains fresh in my mind after 18 years. I loved that inaugural work (“a film […]
Panorama of Change: Venus By Water (Cannes 2021)
By Yun-hua Chen. A tribute to all women who flourish against all odds, showing unusual maturity and sobriety for a debut film.” A panoramic view on women’s living conditions in a southern Chinese city in the 90s, Venus by Water, premiered in the parallel section ACID in Cannes, focuses on […]
Missed Opportunity – Joanne Woodward: Her Life and Career
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Compared to the acting studies of the type produced by Richard Dyer and James Naremore (neither of whom receive mention in either text or bibliography), this study is severely lacking.” This book promises much but delivers little. Far from being “the first to be […]
The Personal Touch – A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Violence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch
A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. While there’s some inevitable overlap…on the whole, this anthology adds, with each chapter, discerning passages of unique insight and interpretation.” There’s a lot of substance proposed in its title, but then again, there’s a lot delivered by the film in question. A Uniquely […]
A Rural Portrait of China: Ripples of Life (Cannes 2021)
By Yun-hua Chen. With such a team, it is thus no surprise that Ripples of Life is able to tellingly allude to Chinese arthouse cinema’s current trend of exploring rural portraits, examine unequal relationships between those who film and those who are filmed, and question the innate outsider perspective of […]
Ambiance over Narrative: Are You Lonesome Tonight? (Cannes 2021)
By Yun-hua Chen. With its fair share of problems, Are You Lonesome Tonight attempts to be unpredictable…like a film which indulges itself in ambiance at the expense of narrative.” Rarely do we see a Chinese noir thriller that is so invested in style and ambiance. Wen Shipei’s debut feature Are […]
Unsavory Blend: Touch (2020)
By Yun-hua Chen. Drifting between numerous subject matters, genres, emotions, cultures, the film proves how too many ingredients can spoil a dish as well as a film.” Touch, the directorial debut of Aleksandra Szczepanowska, is an audacious attempt to mix genres and defy cultural barriers. This one-woman show, where she […]