If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a gamut of tropes and running them through an equally variegated medley of possible scenarios, the film not only fails to convey the breadth of…
Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel are a contemporary duo whose work rebukes and inquires into the reactionary, philosophical response to an accelerated technological development, rendering posthumanist sympathies that in themselves are reflexive and articulate of technocratic fears. They are artists who seek to instigate the nu-materiality of digital…
An improbable 14 films in, and the Star Trek franchise has finally delivered its first truly unwatchable feature film. It’s difficult to think of a previous low that even approaches this level of low in the tenured body of the series, and even those who come to Star…
Admittedly light on story, Rose, a directorial debut from actress Aurélie Saada, is more of a cultural celebration than the straightforward story of aging sexuality (in the vein of Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria) it is sold as. Thoroughly dedicated to the director’s Jewish roots, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, whether…
I was driving to see the cinema’s latest love story and stopped at a red light. On an empty street, on a cloudless night, I found myself making a U-turn. It wasn’t just that I sensed the indie I was going to was factory-made. It wasn’t that it…
A Note on Selection and Organization Criteria The films in our canon were categorized according to the year of their U.S. theatrical release and the distributor behind it — except in cases where a.) the time between the film’s international release and its U.S. one exceeded five years, or b.) the film never received any…
The village schoolteacher, taciturn but possessed of intellectual passions, plays a newly delivered recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” for his class, most of whom appear to be under the age of ten. He lectures his young students on the power of the composer’s work: “Each violin is…
‘Behold,’ the Fairy cried, ‘Palmyra’s ruined palaces! Behold where grandeur frowned! Behold where pleasure smiled! What now remains?’ — “Queen Mab,” Book II, 109-13 When immediately posed the question — at gunpoint, at the behest of a new and obscure autocracy — as to what joins the art…
Convergence and divergence are sometimes indistinguishable from each other, especially when occurring in an ecosystem so rapid, cacophonous, and reflexive. This is the bubble we call digital media, and its operations are living, breathing paradoxes: as algorithmic neurons aggregate trends and in some cases preempt them, individual clusters…
Convergence and divergence are sometimes indistinguishable from each other, especially when occurring in an ecosystem so rapid, cacophonous, and reflexive. This is the bubble we call digital media, and its operations are living, breathing paradoxes: as algorithmic neurons aggregate trends and in some cases preempt them, individual clusters…
Convergence and divergence are sometimes indistinguishable from each other, especially when occurring in an ecosystem so rapid, cacophonous, and reflexive. This is the bubble we call digital media, and its operations are living, breathing paradoxes: as algorithmic neurons aggregate trends and in some cases preempt them, individual clusters…
There are reportedly more than 100 films based on Bram Stoker’s seminal 1897 novel Dracula, and the most damning thing one can say about Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is that it is merely the latest one. Technically a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film of the same name…
Convergence and divergence are sometimes indistinguishable from each other, especially when occurring in an ecosystem so rapid, cacophonous, and reflexive. This is the bubble we call digital media, and its operations are living, breathing paradoxes: as algorithmic neurons aggregate trends and in some cases preempt them, individual clusters…
Would Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg still be an effective movie if it wasn’t entirely sung-through? It seems like an impossible question to answer for arguably the greatest of all film musicals. The film itself even acknowledges the technique’s own absurdism by having a man poke into…
The Return of Godzilla was a haunting revival for Toho’s famous franchise. When released in December of 1984, the film interrupted Godzilla’s nine-year absence from Japanese cinema screens, severing continuity with the 14 prior sequels and picking up 30 years after Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original. It delivers a…
Ever since the disaster that was Green Lantern, one of action cinema’s surest old hands and biggest directors of the ’90s has been toiling away making sturdy, and occasionally lower budget, films. Now 81 years old, most recently Martin Campbell has dabbled in Neeson territory (2022’s Memory), made…
The key word in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is “sorrows,” translated from the German Leiden, which really means something closer to “suffering,” like the kind one feels from a chronic disease; it originates from a Middle-German word that also meant…
In folklore on film, the peasant girl laboring for ungrateful people has been situated in several variations of Cinderella. One of cinema’s most active renditions of the rags-to-riches heroine is found in Three Wishes for Cinderella (Václav Vorlíček, 1973). Three Wishes’ screenplay was adapted from a story by…
After spending his early career transfiguring the aesthetics of early Jean-Luc Godard and other works from the French New Wave’s starting days for his own freewheeling bursts of style that would be dubbed cinéma du look in some circles, Leos Carax has finally turned to what came after.…
An aging singer, years past her prime and in failing health after decades of self-abuse, attempts a Pyrrhic comeback. The compressed structure of a few days in the life of a doomed diva expands outward and backward, taking on the shape of a conventional biopic to explore substance…
In the recent Motion Over Pictures: Two Evenings of Fred Worden retrospective at New York’s Spectacle Theater (co-organized by Paul Attard and Stephen Cappel, with introductions by Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive), Fred Worden’s voice made two appearances across 24 films. The first appearance was from…