By William Blick. Hysterical, soul-stirring, and bewildering…undefinable in the best sense of the word.” Occasionally, I will see a film wherein I do not know where it will lead me. It is at this time that there is often a leap of faith in putting my trust in the hands […]
Pandemic Dreams: A Trip Elsewhere
By William Blick. A zany yet suspenseful cinematic experience.” I saw the phrase, “after the plague, came the renaissance,” scribbled on a subway station wall and thought it was perhaps somewhat applicable to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems that there has been a huge surge of creativity […]
Cinema without Reason: Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaalí!
By Jonathan Monovich. Dupieux’s Daaaaaalí! understands that to make a faithful film about Dalí it should lack convention.” Though Salvador Dalí’s paintings are far more famous than his contributions to cinema, Dalí’s peculiar signature left an indelible mark on film history as well. Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s collaboration, Un chien […]
Young at Heart: Julio Torres’ Problemista
By Jonathan Monovich. Writer-director-star Julio Torres cleverly compares the one-month countdown for finding work visa sponsorship to both an hour glass running out of sand and a never-ending maze…. Problemista‘s tone possesses a childlike innocence, which works quite well in contrasting serious subject matter.” Slinkys that refuse to fall down […]
Recent Contemporary Protest Cinema and Political-Cultural Exoticism
By Hamed Soleimanzadeh. By bringing attention to the challenges of the surrounding world, exotic protest cinema encourages audiences to take responsibility against the injustices and inefficiencies.” The concept of political-cultural exoticism in protest cinema refers to the presentation and understanding of ethnic, national, and regional cultures and policies in films […]
Scorsese’s Night Moves: After Hours (1985)
By Jeremy Carr. Scorsese’s follow-up to The King of Comedy (1982) can be as stressed as any thriller or even a horror film, or as ostensibly innocuous and banal as a plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese paperweight.” It starts with a pen that doesn’t work, just as he’s […]
A Short, Sweet Dream: Theodore Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly (2021)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Pleasantly rough around the edges and anchored by two strong female performances, the co-writer and director’s feature debut offers a bit more than homage but never quite escapes its influences.” David Lynch has become a convenient (and sometimes lazy) point of comparison for any film with […]
A Magnetic Mystery: David Lynch’s Lost Highway
By Jeremy Carr. Lynch at his storytelling best.” David Lynch can tell a pretty standard story when he wants to. While films like The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and The Straight Story (1999) surely have their moments of classically “Lynchian” eccentricity, their fundamental plots unfold along relatively orthodox […]
A Surreal Soul to Sell: Jan Švankmajer’s Faust (1994)
By Jeremy Carr. Faust submits an unnerving introduction to a world defined by cumulative weirdness and instability, where physical transformation is a prevalent force engendering the potential for change….” From F.W. Murnau to Alexander Sokurov, adaptations of the Faust legend have been cinematically rendered by some of the medium’s supreme visionaries […]