Absence — no matter how great or small — creates mystery. Mystery inspires intrigue or, at the very least, interest. Interest encourages active engagement:…
Throughout Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, the softly croaky and comforting voice of Martin Scorsese repeatedly reminds us that the…
The documentarian’s camera — more often than not — observes, investigates, and deliberates in media res. The past, then, is either recounted through a…
The haunting lack of something or someone is ever-present in Tatiana Mazú González’s Every Document of Civilization. We first hear two female voices —…
The psychoanalytical turn of film theory in the 1970s, foundational to critical and theoretical film discourses on cinema to date, has always had a…
How does one approach a film that reveals everything about itself in its opening sequence? Do we applaud its ability to summarize its themes…
The specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) looms large over Chantal Akerman’s The Captive (2000). At times, it’s to such an extent that it…
Long heralded as the harbinger of snore-inducing boredom, slow cinema, in actuality, is a somewhat paradoxical replica of what film scholar Tom Gunning calls…
The depiction of grief in films is as variable as film form. It can be outwardly melodramatic like in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue…
The objective of any piece of art is to make us realize that the world is bigger than the inside of our own head.…
Imtiaz Ali, classified as an auteur for skewering the conventional (in)sensibility of Bollywood’s melodramatic romances, is actually somewhat unclassifiable. He began his career in…
In an interview with Michael Haneke about 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the final part of the director’s then lesser-known Glaciation Trilogy (1989 -…
Hollywood film scholar Thomas Schatz’s essay “Film Genre and the Genre Film” describes our relationship with the film genre as both static and dynamic.…
Cinephilia is a dangerous game. Follow the director’s rules closely, and you are, more often than not, rewarded with insider access. These are reference…
Toward the end of Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition trilogy (1959-61), his unsparingly brutal anti-war epic about the Japanese military’s unsparingly brutal treatment of…
The “social issue” film in contemporary Bollywood has as many forms of expression as it has sub-categories of issues. Take, for instance, the “women-centric”…
The staff of In Review Online have come to the collective decision to abide by the international call from Strike Germany. We will be…
The staff of In Review Online have come to the collective decision to abide by the international call from Strike Germany. We will be…