Under the cover of blackout curtains, a woman jolts herself awake with a hair-raising shout. She catches her breath, but cannot shake off her ring of panic, the quiver and cold sweat of constant fear. This will be one of the more peaceful moments of her day.
Self reflexive, political, and experimental, the filmisessentially the Carax take on Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988), in which Godard stitched together clips from hundreds of films in order to create his own critique of the art form.
These killers are seldom forced to face their victims, and because of this, they are free to live in a sanitized world of rationalizations and moral fantasies, remaining comfortable even as the earth and its inhabitants are dying just outside their doors.
Abrahams frequently shifts aesthetic registers, from stylized vignettes to handheld observation, introspective narration to candid conversation, the heightened past to the quotidian present. Abrahams has explained that she wanted to evoke sense-memory, as if inviting the viewer into her own state of mind.
Mohammad Rasoulof is part of a rich legacy of courageous Iranian filmmakers who have bravely challenged the authority and inevitability of the Islamic Republic, through resistance films that have often left them exiled from the homeland and people their art is fighting for.
The silent approach makes the otherworldly encounters even more striking. The animals, of course, do not have the vocabulary for what they are seeing—thus it becomes a test for the audience in turn, of interpretation and meaning. Zilbalodis talked to us about creating this physical language and sustaining it for feature length.
In collaboration with Huppert, who has seldom appeared so playful and unguarded, he depicts Iris as supremely attentive and sympathetic to her students, while challenging them to dig deeper and shine a light on the thornier parts of themselves that they tend to keep buried.
Kapadia again expertly maneuvers themes of romance, ambition, and injustice in her second feature, a languid, affectionate triptych of three working women in Mumbai coming to terms with their varying displacements.
His body of work has gotten increasingly whimsical and pedantic; here he substitutes kitchen-sink realism for an aesthetic that feels like a pre-distressed t-shirt.
Touching the Screen
The way we see a game—whether we can control the camera or not, whether the frame moves or is static, how the frame moves—is an artistic quality as important as (and often interlocked with) its interface, its methods of immersion...
It is the very aridity of its emotional content, parched to desert-of-the-real levels by de-aging effects that render Hanks and Wright (and several of their co-stars) as weirdly artificial and subject to illusionistic manipulation as their environment, that is so startling—and, for the most part, beguiling.
Eastwood has no illusions about the legal system, but at no point does he suggest that it is rotten. In fact, the story he is telling puts its faith in the personal integrity of public officials and the facing of inconvenient facts.
In the wake of the Small Axe cycle, McQueen now sets out to submit British cultural identity to a stress test during a period of maximum crisis.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Mask, Arrebato, The Stuff, Cuadecuc, vampir, Tall Shadows of the Wind, Drag Me to Hell.
Although shot in 2000, Frailty heralds themes that would trouble the coming era (and its cinema): Christofascist warfare, “cleansing” the region of unsavory figures, the son split between patriarchal fidelity and his own scruples.