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 a nine-year dearth of new Godzilla films on Japanese cinema screens, severing continuity with the 14 prior sequels and picking up 30 years after Ishirō Honda’s 1954…
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…
As of the publication of this review, there are 119 Letterboxd reviews logged for Chloe Abrahams’ debut feature The Taste of Mango. In one capsule from June 2023, the author avoids synopsis and goes straight for the jugular, writing: “this story is too important for it to be…
“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate,” says a seemingly omniscient and distractingly didactic female narrator as the camera closes up on our protagonist, Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett),…
Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s Gaucho Gaucho is a mesmerizing study of form and image-making, a film as preoccupied with its subjects as it is with the act of capturing them. Gaucho Gaucho premiered at Sundance in 2024, and follows in the footsteps of the pair’s celebrated The…
Arriving at the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia this year, I found myself witness to a brewing controversy. Deaf Lovers, a new film about two star crossed lovers — one Ukrainian and one Russian — had managed to uniquely piss off both pro-Ukrainian groups and had…
Way back in 2000, coming off a critical and box office slump that consumed most of the ’90s, Ridley Scott struck back with Gladiator. (It’s hard now to remember that at the time it was only Scott’s 11th feature film.) It told the story of Roman general Maximus…
Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieślowski has achieved something that only the Russian formalist Dziga Vertov did with his epochal film Man with a Movie Camera 60…