The fall festival season has looked far different this year, limited both in its ability to exhibit films and in the breadth of selection available. As a result, heading into the 58th New York Film Festival, InRO has already published pieces on roughly one-third…
What Frederick Wiseman does, at this point, can be boiled down to an easy elevator pitch, which at once vastly undersells the depth and subtle variations of his mode of documentary filmmaking, but also speaks to the consistency of his model. Indeed, the approach…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
Venice International Film Festival 2020 — Dispatch 1: Mainstream, City Hall, Notturno
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to understand why: it’s fertile, dramatic territory, rife with irony, hypocrisy, and mystery to tease out into some ostensibly meaningful cultural…
Toxic masculinity had a year; scan the top three titles on this list and you’ll find three films about self-involved men belaboring the value of ‘their art’ — made by three self-involved men belaboring the value of their art. That may seem like a…
Over half a century into Frederick Wiseman’s storied career, the legendary documentarian’s interest in systems — that is, how they function in relation to the persons and spaces that constitute them — is an accepted truism. Following Ex Libris: The New York Public Library,…
Our third dispatch from the Toronto International Film Festival (here’s the first and here’s the second) includes our takes on a few hold-overs from this year’s Cannes slate (Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, Gaspar Noe’s Climax, Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun), a couple of mammoth documentaries (Wang Bing’s Dead…
Frederick Wiseman is one of a handful of contemporary filmmakers who can make duration a virtue: Ex Libris uses its staggering, 197-minute runtime to thoroughly examine the institution of the New York Public Library. Going back to the 1960s, Wiseman has proven a master of vivisecting spaces and…
We have a lot planned for the fall film festival season—including multiple dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. But first, a modest precursor spotlighting five noteworthy titles that screened during the season’s initial Big Film Fest. Our sampling of the 2017 Venice International…
There were times during this especially tumultuous year when it seemed as if the world at large was on the verge of collapsing. A whole commercial jetliner seemingly disappeared without a trace, leading some ostensibly serious news outlets to put forth honest-to-god inquires about…
