When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for quite some time: the ’50s saw him adapt the words of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Rashomon), Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot), and William Shakespeare (Throne of Blood)…
The art of adaptation precludes mere transcription, most particularly where the written word is translated to a visual medium like film. Nowhere is the canvas for this art more vast than in the realm of genre cinema, where the rules of reality hold no sway and imaginative faculties…
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. Fiction and non-fiction filmmakers have used this (super)power to highlight not only the minutiae of human life, but also to explore its unassuming…
The legacy of a venerated musician comprises the myriad testimonies in They Shot the Piano Player. Colleagues and family of Francisco Tenório Júnior share personal memories of a nearly forgotten figurehead in the Bossa Nova scene whose meteoric rise was brutally curtailed by his disappearance in 1976. The…
As a television actor whose first directorial effort, a spiky genre mash-up that nebulously spoke to the zeitgeist, won an Academy Award for their screenwriting, and instantly established them as an “above the title” brand, what’s a young filmmaker to do for a follow-up? If you’re Jordan Peele,…
Songs of Earth On November 14, 2023, this year, the United States federal government released the National Climate Assessment, the latest report comprehensively spelling out the climate crisis’ projected risks and impacts. The prognosis isn’t pretty, with experts concluding it’s effectively too late to prevent many things from…
When critic Darren Hughes and filmmaker Paul Harrill founded The Public Cinema in 2015, their goal was to bring important works of world cinema and experimental film to Knoxville, TN. Over the next seven years, they worked with the Big Ears Festival and local theaters to organize over…
Until 2021, France did not have a set legal age of consent. Then Vanessa Springora wrote Le Consentement in 2020, an autobiographical memoir about her experience being groomed and abused by the famed author Gabriel Matzneff for two long years. She was just 14 when the abuse began;…
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film Fallen Leaves is a continuation of his Proletariat series. The previous films — Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and The Match Factory Girl (1990) — are known for their minimalism, their offbeat, almost farcical dry humor, and the characters’ Beckettian displays…
Seemingly the only point of Albert Brooks: Defending My Life is to state in plain English that Albert Brooks is a great comedian and a great artist. Despite the title — an inevitable nod to Brooks’ film Defending Your Life, where his character is sent to a bureaucratic…
The age-old question of how to know if your romantic partner is “the one” is a confrontation that every couple has encountered at some point. Its very unknowability has led to endless consternation, uncertainty, and settling out of convenience. Christos Nikou’s Fingernails posits a world where technology can…
Light Matter’s fourth 2023 program is titled “Blurred Lines.” Though lines literal and figurative blur within many of the constituent films, the title refers more to the blurring of the boundaries of film and art brought on by the propagation of machine learning. Though not all of the…
One of the pleasures of encountering experimental film and video in a festival setting is the chance to get a survey, the lay of the land so to speak, rather than isolated gestures shared on YouTube or Vimeo. Organized as a series of seven programs by curator James…
Meg Ryan is arguably nothing less than one of the all-time great romantic leading ladies, having earned the accolades with a trio of the defining rom-coms of the ‘80s and ‘90s: When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail. She also helped a dozen more…
Here at InRO, we’ve been banging the drum for low-budget action auteur Jesse V. Johnson for years. Best known for his numerous collaborations with former stuntman and martial arts expert Scott Adkins, Johnson has been churning out rock-solid genre flicks for two decades, often at a ludicrous pace…
Sofia Coppola has been chronicling the private spaces and inner lives of young women for her entire career and her new film Priscilla — an adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Elvis and Me — feels like the culmination of a twenty-plus-year project that simultaneously reveals the limitations to…
It might be quite certain that the contemporary rom-com genre is far from its heyday. One simple and explicit reason for this is that most of its films follow a very specific set of conventions, playing it overly safe, as manifested both in terms of clichéd screenwriting and…
An example of the laziness rife in digital filmmaking, Erige Sehiri’s Under the Fig Trees employs a haphazard handheld cinematography that echoes the immediacy of prosumerism (or, the increased involvement of consumers in production processes), with a color grade drastically alien to the environs Sehiri seems intent on…
Out of John Edward Williams’ three seminal novels — a trio of recently rediscovered bildungsromans about hapless young men who live uneventful lives (save for Gaius Octavius) filled with regret — Butcher’s Crossing, objectively the weakest of the bunch, was always going to be the easiest to adapt…
Blanket declarations about three-hour-plus runtimes always seem curious when filmmakers employ said length for wildly different purposes. Though the sweeping epic may be the most classic Hollywood implementation, the space can be used to house labyrinthine plots, emphasize repetition, or facilitate other experimental practices. In Rodrigo Moreno’s new…