Features
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.
Arabian Nights is essentially composed of a series of indulgences and digressions—some angry and some absurd, all imaginatively composed and unconcerned with the boundaries of traditional storytelling.
Mad Men is about a young nation’s dubious promise and potential for continual reinvention, and the desire this instills in the individual to forget one’s history and past, and in its place, construct another life and identity afresh.
The “Sensory Stories” exhibit at Museum of the Moving Image is a playground for visitors of all ages to have personal encounters with emerging media technologies, novel interfaces, and experimental narrative forms that haven’t yet stabilized as familiar conventions.
The strain from the unfortunate state of worldwide film funding has been felt more than ever at this year’s festival. Features Louder Than Bombs, In the Shadow of Women, One Floor Below.
Alien: Isolation’s ingenuity as a work that adapts a film to a video game is in its tacit acknowledgment that the player knows what is going to happen in this universe. It’s a retread of the original film, but one that is aware it is a retread.