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 “cinema of attractions.” Gunning coined this term to celebrate the non-narrative pleasures of cinema pre-1906 that audiences from all parts of the world…
Once upon a time, there were frightened people. They were so frightened that their imagination escaped,” says a soothing, soft, and elderly feminine voice. The words belong to Jalala, the storyteller (or should we say seller?) of the barren and hostile enclave in which Hala Elkoussy sets her…
It wasn’t all that long ago when it seemed John Green’s shine couldn’t be blocked. A Young Adult author coming of prominence during the great age of Young Adult literature, Green skyrocketed to pop(/nerd) culture stardom on the ubiquity of both his books and their film adaptations. The…
For expectant moms seeking the sort of potty humor that What To Expect When You’re Expecting, simply can’t deliver, Pamela Adlon’s debut feature film Babes might be just what the OB-GYN ordered. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau star as Eden and Dawn, two lifelong besties who find themselves…
Fan fiction has long been an outlet for superfans to reimagine worlds and celebrities, weaving narratives out of their wildest fantasies. Whether you call it creative writing, an exercise in delusion, or a mixture of both, the genre has certainly hit the mainstream, with self-published novels becoming #BookTok…
Audiences are excited about the art of the stunt again. You’ve got Tom Cruise skydiving and crashing trains, Christopher Nolan’s Protagonist bungee-jumping over skyscrapers, Keanu Reeves vs. a hundred goons. Articles are being written about practical stunts vs. CGI. The consensus is building that there should be an…
The capacity to imagine a better future is integral to any successful progressive movement. Amidst historic protests around the United States against both the relentless siege by Israel on Gaza and major universities’ financial ties to machines of war enabling the siege, students hold their ground in the…
Slow, Marija Kavtaradzė’s second feature film, finds solace in the physicality that builds a world around its audience. The opening moments find a man mounting Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė) as the two bridge the distance between their bodies in tandem, their breaths in rhythm. The man on top of…
Many critics have already labeled Joanna Armow’s laboriously titled The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed a “millennial” comedy (a fitting alternate title: Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time), a descriptor that makes a certain amount of sense but that also…
It’s undeniably passé — and often critically fruitless — to note the difficult “art of adaptation” when it comes to translating literature for the screen, but films like Downtown Owl throw the challenge into such sharp relief that it’s impossible to skate past it unobserved. Based on the…
With our own culture marginalized, when it isn’t being stripped for its most clean and convenient parts, queer people have often taken back from the mainstream, twisting our culture into something new, or, perhaps more subversively, revealing the latent queerness that was always there. Superhero movies, Hollywood’s primary…
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 Indian indie space, making films like Socha Na Tha (2005), Jab We Met (2007), and (to a lesser extent) Love Aaj Kal (2009) that tinkered with the typical…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with Karl Marx’s famed specter of communism, have come together not to exorcise but embrace this specter in a warm hug and to give it…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion magazine editor in his 30s, who, in spite of his good looks, a life cushioned by material comforts, and a close-knit circle of gay…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women struggling against an entrenched patriarchal system in modern-day Karachi, is a resounding success, fueled by a remarkable performance courtesy of actress Ramesha Nawal; the…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim as one of the queerest films of the 2020s so far. That his first two films, You Won’t Be Alone and Of An Age,…
Of Living Without Illusion A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film, from the past — emerge in the stretch of the present space, less a sensation of tension than an accumulation.…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film, from the past — emerge in the stretch of the present space, less a sensation of tension than an accumulation. Connection becomes as likely…
The inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies closed this past Sunday with the world premiere of Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar’s outrageous mockumentary Rap World. The buzzy event was attended by numerous local film fixtures and luminaries, and was held at Vidiots, the beloved, newly…
Ned Benson’s The Greatest Hits opens with its heroine, Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a young librarian, standing alone in her beautifully half-lit, tranquil apartment before a mapped-out board littered with various notes, date cards, and pictures of her and her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet). As she closes her eyes,…
You Burn Me Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France; The Tempest in Sycorax. Of course, these are not straightforward adaptations, and Piñeiro uses…