The objective of any piece of art is to make us realize that the world is bigger than the inside of our own head. The…
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 the…
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 – 1994),…
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. The…
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 points…
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 its…
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” film.…
The staff of In Review Online have come to the collective decision to abide by the international call from Strike Germany. We will be withholding…
The staff of In Review Online have come to the collective decision to abide by the international call from Strike Germany. We will be withholding…
The interaction between documenting the act of filmmaking and the final film as a meaning-making document for the filmmaker, subject, and spectator is a staple…
In film scholar Gilberto Perez’s incredibly perceptive book on the ontology of cinema, The Material Ghost, the moving pictures are always, well, moving: between documentary…
There comes a time when you just can’t swallow the bitter pill of reality; you have to crush it up, mix it in with some…
The recent construction of the $217 million Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, confirmed by Hindu mythology as Shri Ram’s birthplace in India, and the ruling right-wing…
Any new dystopian science fiction release on Netflix — TV show, live-action film, animation, short, whatever — emanates a deep sense of foreboding. This isn’t…
There always seems to be an imaginary asterisk placed on discussions centered around films made by filmmakers who have been pushed into a Kafkaesque corner.…
The overwrought, overexplained, overedited maximalism of modern-day blockbuster cinema is a somewhat dumbed-down version of what film theorist Tom Gunning championed early, non-narrative silent cinema…
Symbols are like Alfred Hitchcock’s (flawed) definition of drama — “life with the dull bits cut out.” Their universal appeal derives from prioritizing a familiar…
The camera’s all-encompassing eye, famously termed the “kino-eye” by Russian filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov, has always been capable of revealing the mysterious and hidden.…
Can the blatant artificiality of cinema fill the gaping void of reality? Acclaimed Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s resilient but consistently hurting Four Daughters asks…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s endlessly digressive Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director’s first of four films produced outside his home country, features a particular digression that links it directly to…