Features
Halloween is our most cinematic holiday; for a few hours in the dark, it turns our everyday world into a surreal, upside-down place. In this short film we go trick or treating with some of the Halloweens that have haunted our collective movie dreams.
Pialat’s quest was to seek out something more artistically valuable and emotionally direct: a cinema of genuine immediacy and truth, a cinema from which fragments of real life could erupt from the screen, where moments could simply exist, freed from the yoke of their context or origins.
Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker transplanted to New York when she made News from Home, yet she communicated something very close to exactly what I felt and continue to feel as a Staten Islander.
The troubled history and equally troubling current events are present at every turn. Last year the festival was canceled when over 100,000 refugees from Syria and other parts of Iraq flooded into Duhok.
It is a film of indelible portraiture; the plot, as it is, exists largely to transfer our protagonists (and the camera) between congregations of winos, from gin mills to games of dominos around a flophouse common room’s pot-bellied stove.
It’s easy to make something big with three-dimensional graphics, but it’s hard to create a true sense of overwhelming largeness, of the self as puny in comparison to something else.
Directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (who translated his original stage choreography to the screen) fill their 70mm frame with ecstatic movement, operatic emotion, and brilliant color: it’s a dazzling Hollywood spectacle yet it still retains a remarkable delicacy and texture.
What started in 1994 as a two-day, modestly attended, parochially English affair has, in the decades following, tripled in length, welcomes more than ten times the number of visitors, and is now a tent-pole event on the international documentary industry calendar.
The wide-gauge format reached its greatest popularity in the 1950s amid a boom of new innovations intended to reverse the fortunes of foundering Hollywood studios; for a time, they even appeared to have done the trick. But every great reign is followed by an epoch of decadence . . .
Brainstorm is a special-effects film in the sense that it contains more than its fair share of visual trickery but also because it’s concerned with the people and institutions that develop that trickery.
Though Sergei Loznitsa has made eighteen films since 1996, delineating a logical arc in his career—as one might have attempted to doduring a full retrospective at Crossing Europe Filmfestival Linz this past April—isn’t easy.
A visual poet with a penchant for knockabout brawling, an idealist who gravitated to tales of melancholic loss, a notorious tyrant who cultivated long friendships, a nineteenth-century sensibility revered by many a hardcore modernist: John Ford, as they say, contained multitudes.
Kashish has grown into south Asia’s biggest queer film festival, was voted as one of the top five LGBT festivals in the world, and is today India’s only LGBT film festival given official permission to be held in a mainstream cinema hall.
Yang’s games are explicitly political, explicitly homoerotic, explicitly masculine. They are technologically proficient and artistically confident. They are some of the most exciting works produced in the video game form in recent times, and are well worth engaging with.