Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? comes courtesy of Studio Canal and Working Title, two production companies who have created a cottage industry of star-laden British features that tend to err on the side of twee in their depiction of love in the modern age,…
Perennially undervalued, Joseph H. Lewis receives a single paragraph in Andrew Sarris’ canonical The American Cinema (relegated to the expressive esoterica category alongside Andre de Toth, Allan Dwan, Jacques Tourneur, etc.). Sarris at least has the good sense to give a special mention to Gun Crazy, which he…
It’s easy to see into the future. All one has to do is see the present and ask what would happen if we accepted the weirdest part of it. It’s always funny to inevitably get the details wrong — the 1970s color palettes of Logan’s Run (1976) or…
Part of what’s so great about the Prismatic Ground festival is that it makes space for genuine cinematic curios, works that are so sufficiently distinct from usual modes of creation that they might otherwise slip through the cracks. That is definitely the case with Where Is This Street?,…
Alexandre Larose’s work is no stranger to the descriptors underlined by Impressionism, typically reflecting its aesthetic sensibilities of refracted, textured light. In fact, he seems to lean into these sensibilities in the synopses for the three films that comprise his scènes de ménage, discerning them — each a…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done a great job of earning a reputation for grinding down the personalities of interesting directors-for-hire with endless tinkering and boring pre-vizzed visual effects sequences. Filmmakers like Edgar Wright, Ryan Coogler, and Sam Raimi have all struggled, to varying degrees of success or…
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Eight Mountains opens with a young man’s voiceover accompanying a series of natural Italian landscapes. The voice belongs to Pietro, the only son of Torinese middle-class parents — his father a factory engineer, his mother a teacher…
Concerning the brief, fleeting romance between a woman who writes audio descriptions for films and her harshest critic, an all but totally blind man, Naomi Kawase’s thinly-sketched Radiance feels designed to court claims of poignancy. The pair clash repeatedly as she tries to lend assistance he thinks he…
Is there a greater rags-to-riches story than Charlie Chaplin’s? A real-life tramp, Chaplin grew up dirt poor on the streets of London. The son of two destitute music hall entertainers (dad an abusive alcoholic, mom committed to a mental institution), as a child, Chaplin showed promise performing stage…
In what can be construed both as commendation and criticism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. is assuredly a film of the times. Its contemporary grappling with hot-button issues, alongside its pointedly liminal geographic setting, enables a somewhat twofold diagnosis of political and ideological relationships, from the positions of both oppressor…
In Sean Garrity’s The End of Sex, romantic comedy only begins after the dazzling charm of first loves and first dates wears off. Enough about love at first sight, and in its place is love that is worn out by the exhausting mundanity of parenthood. The film follows…
In 2002, Laura Citarella co-founded El Pampero Cine with Mariano Llinás, Agustín Mendaliharzu, and Alejo Moguillansky. In 2011, they released Citarella’s first feature, Ostende, starring Laura Paredes, who would also go on to star in Llinás’ epic La Flor, which Citarella produced. That 14-and-a-half-hour film brought El Pampero…
The stepmother is typically an outsider role in literature. Not so in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children. Adapted from Romain Gary’s novel, Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid — which centers on a man’s infertility — Zlotowski’s latest tells a story that’s evolved to be a character study…
A beguiling amalgam of classic opera sensibility, modern dance performance, and Badlands-esque, lovers-on-the-run romantic tragedy, Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is a deeply idiosyncratic and electrifying film that nonetheless struggles to locate a governing artistic cogency. Very loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s seminal opera, Millepied’s film takes more spiritual than…
Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted is a high-concept romantic action comedy with movie stars and a decent budget that, were this 2005, would presumably have the potential to be both a hit and a tabloid item, in the vein of something similar to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (minus the whole…
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a Shadow (1958), Man With a Shotgun (1961) — but is probably best known to contemporary audiences for his yakuza films. A relatively inhibited take on…
The Real Thing isn’t without considerable flaws, but it still allows plenty to percolate across its behemoth runtime. The unspoken commonality of all the projects that find notions of TV vs. cinema foisted upon them is their duration. Not just the cumulative length of all the episodes/installments/etc. taken…
In This Issue: FEATURES: Re-Interrogating the Body: An Interview With Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel by Ryan Akler-Bishop Dead Ringers by Igor Fishman KICKING THE CANON: Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven) by Greg Cwik // Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki) by Fred Barrett FILM REVIEWS: Beau Is Afraid…
Anthropologist-filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s work dissolves the space between their camera and their subject. Previous films Leviathan and Caniba both treat their respective subjects — the marine landscapes of commercial fishing, the domestic world of an infamous cannibal — with startling intimacy, but the proximity of…
The hardest working man in show business, otherwise known as John Swab, is back with One Day as a Lion, the director’s third feature of 2023 — and we’re not even halfway through April. But for the first time in the filmmaker’s career, script duties come courtesy of…