From our Honorable Mentions post: It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like none other in recent history. Significantly, by virtue of living through such times, it’s also a year that retuned minds to see history being made in the present. There…
London Film Festival 2020 — Dispatch 1: Films We’ve Already Covered
Another week, another festival. For this year’s BFI London Film Festival, it’s business as usual, which is to say the unusual business of 2020 film festivals. Like others before it, London will be employing a similar hybrid format, mixing socially-distanced physical screenings with a…
The Projectionist is a lovely elegy for the glory days of film exhibition, one that 2020 has brought into surprising focus. Since getting clean a few years ago, Abel Ferrara has been remarkably productive. Interspersed between more ambitious projects (such as this year’s Tomasso and the…
The director’s latest work is built on quiet moments of spiritual and professional reflection, a Fellini-esque inward gaze at the artist and his art. Originally premiering in the Special Screenings section at 2019 Cannes Film Festival, Tommaso marks Abel Ferrara’s return to narrative filmmaking…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words,…
For virtually his entire career, Abel Ferrara has seemed to occupy a liminal space in film criticism, not unlike the spaces his characters seem to so often find themselves in — seedy bars, brothels, hotel rooms, all way stations on the road to nowhere.…
Relating to an interviewer about his moviegoing habits as a child, Abel Ferrara noted that his primary interest was in Westerns, and his interest in film, naturally, did not broaden until reaching early adulthood when he discovered directors like Pasolini, Godard and Fassbinder through…
Berlin Film Festival 2020 | Dispatch 3: Siberia, Isabella, Bad Tales
The 2020 Berlin International Film Festival may have closed its curtains on another year, but we’re still here talking its slate. Our third dispatch begins by making a liar of me — we go long once more, in service of tackling Abel Ferrara’s latest.…
We’ve decided to do something a little different this year for our 2019 (so far) lists; instead of a formal poll, were using this as an occasion to plug some of the most positive stuff that we’ve written this year, with just a few…