Two’s not enough for a trend, but I think it’s terribly fascinating that 2015’s two best cinematic love stories were both directed by gay men, are both not about gay men, but are both nonetheless depictions of modes of sexual and romantic desire that tend to be marginalised in mainstream society. Todd Haynes graced us […]
The three films made by Jafar Panahi after he was forbidden by the Iranian government from making more films form an intriguing little symbolic arc. 2011’s This Is Not a Film is all clastrophobic realism, a barely-fictionalised diary of Panahi’s own life under house arrest, the director playing himself and his apartment playing itself and […]
The first thing to point out, because it’s really amazing the more you think about it, it’s a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios’ 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It’s a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we’re watching as the story isn’t “actually” be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. […]
Overhype is a deadly thing, and I don’t want to contribute to it. So let’s just leave it at this: if you’re on the fence about Mad Max: Fury Road, I think you should see it. Go now, and do not be overhyped. If you’re sticking around to find out why I think you should […]
Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best DirectorScreens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16World premiere: 15 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival There is a heightened irony at the heart of Timbuktu that is completely obvious, and which fuels the rage that drives every moment of Abderrahmane Sissako’s first feature in eight years, following the great […]
It is easy to first focus on how Goodbye to Language is yet another film in Jean-Luc Godard’s late career collection of essay films describing morality, culture, the state of modern Europe, how cinematic images produce and limit meaning, because that’s what it is. It’s not at all unlike a remake of his last feature, […]
One doesn’t get to use the word “exquisite” enough to describe movies, so it gives me great pleasure to declare that Mr. Turner is exactly that. It is, to begin with, stupefyingly beautiful: not another movie in 2014, not another movie since The Tree of Life, in fact, has made me literally stop breathing because […]
If I may risk being pithy about the gravest subject in the wide world, we’re living through a golden age of documentaries about mass killings in southeast Asia. Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary, extraordinarily crushing dyad of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, with their historiographical study of the murder of accused Communists in […]
Last year’s superlative At Berkeley dropped me squarely into the “Frederick Wiseman, where have you been all my life?” phase of my cinephilia, and now National Gallery confirms it: this man’s documentaries are magnificent, essential, pure cinema. You can draw a line straight back from National Gallery‘s patient and inflectionless shots of people standing in […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/21World premiere: 17 January, 2014, Sundance Film Festival The business of being a fan of horror movies is a frustrating and thankless one, since they are so especially prone to being bad, but ever so often one comes along that you can stand up and cheer and point at and […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20World premiere: 28 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival The Look of Silence is unmistakably a great film, though it is not a singular one. For one thing, it isn’t an object totally complete unto itself, like director Joshua Oppenheimer’s previous work, The Act of Killing: it is a sequel […]
It’s fun, kind of, to finally catch up with a major talking point movie after it’s been out awhile, and to have seen its reception shift around a bit. With >Boyhood, we’ve seen the initial near-religious rapture of its Sundance reviews give way, bit by bit, to a backlash, and now we’re far enough along […]
