Tove disrupts standard biopic conventions and mines meaning from its language-heavy approach. In a 1946 letter to her love Vivica Bandler, Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson wrote: “I know you don’t believe there is an afterwards. How surprised you will be, Vi, when I come floating along on…
A favorite on the international festival circuit with a robust filmography of at least 40 films made over 50 or so years, Júlio Bressane looms large as one of Brazil’s most enduring experimental filmmakers, specializing in postmodern syntheses of the literary, theatrical, and cinematic that indulge in silly…
Laird Cregar, a man with virtually no name recognition today, was, in his time, a popular American stage actor, one who was fast-tracked to Hollywood and appeared in a few box-office hits in the early ’40s, and who tragically died at age 31 right before hitting it big.…
Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and frosty reaches of Eastern Russia has been slowly but surely building a robust regional cinema separate from the Russian film industry writ large. Sakha…
Scarecrow Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and frosty reaches of Eastern Russia has been slowly but surely building a robust regional cinema separate from the Russian film industry writ large.…
In the Heights isn’t going to save the theatrical experience, but at 143 minutes, will help kill some time. In development since the musical made its Broadway debut (basically), a cinematic adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights arrives this week in the U.S., positioned as Warner Bros.…
Spike Lee’s 1991 Jungle Fever, a work with a title and subject matter seemingly designed to court — indeed, demand — controversy, is at its core a study of extreme contrasts. While Lee has been accused of a great many things during his four-decade career, being a subtle…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often plays a crucial role. Whether it’s the seaside (in The State I Am In, Jerichow and Barbara), lakes and ponds (in Gespenster and…
The playfulness of Chantal Akerman is, throughout her work, always nebulous. A smile, a laugh, a tall-standing stride: these do not signify transparent gestures, so much as the ephemera that coat the quotidian and make it beautiful, elusive, and singular. In her films and writing, Akerman is a…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as a “horizontal” story. Taken together, of course, the matter is quite different, and the resulting triptych has been described as a kind of…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only if you choose to tease it out, as he’s otherwise content to foreground the immediate virtues of each film, an approach that 2003’s…
The State I Am In, Christian Petzold’s theatrical feature debut, begins with a song. Opening on a profile shot of its central character, Jeanne (Julia Hummer), as she buys a drink at a beach café, goes to a jukebox to put on Tim Hardin’s “How Can We Hang…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing his serial enthusiasm for genre alongside his signature undercurrents of fleeting but doomed passion, Cuba Libre, his made-for-television second feature, quietly aches and smolders…
One of the great madcap poets of the American cinema, Alan Rudolph has seemingly slipped into irrelevance since his heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. If he’s mentioned at all in contemporary discourse, it’s usually to acknowledge his apprenticeship (of a sort) with Robert Altman, or the handful…
Deliver Us from Evil fails in both its attempts at severe drama and action spectacle, proving an equal opportunity offender in the process. If the title of Hong Won-chan’s nihilistic slog of a crime thriller Deliver Us from Evil points to anything, it’s that the film’s milieu is made…
Few, if any, artists in the history of modern popular music experienced a creative eruption as rich as did Miles Davis did in the years leading up to his temporary retirement in 1975. Already the biggest name in jazz and the progenitor of numerous stylistic innovations, by the…
Spring Blossom feels under-realized on the whole, but at least introduces a distinct authorial voice worth following. Part of the official selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival that never was, Spring Blossom sees Suzanne Lindon, daughter of renowned French actors Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, direct and star…
Freedom. is a platitude-heavy onslaught of alternately generic and sympathy-seeking songwriting that makes for a wholly embarrassing EP. Offering a second helping of solipsistic pop psalms just in time for Easter, Justin Bieber has “blessed” listeners with a new EP worth of material only a mere month after…
Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi Rhiannon Giddens may not be the only musician who recorded an album during lockdown, but she may be one of the best-suited for such a project. For one thing, she spent quarantine with her partner, the jazz instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, with whom she…
“Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong.” This message from Stevie Wonder to his listeners was embossed in braille on the cover of the original LP pressings of Talking Book, his 1972…
Spiral fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of the Saw franchise, deviating from the series formula to remarkably diminished results. Spiral: From the Book of Saw is but the latest attempt to reboot the infamous Saw franchise, a horror series so popular that it essentially kicked off the entire “torture porn” fad that…