The Christophers Against the notion of cinematic auteurism, it has sometimes been thought enough to respond that, after all, cinema is a collaborative medium to…
Sound of Falling Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
The Invasion Moral judgments in artwork tend to be tinged in shades of gray. This is sometimes expressed by citing Jean Renoir’s unofficial motto that…
Don Juan Serge Bozon’s follow-up to Madame Hyde (2017), Don Juan seems to continue that film’s revisionist update of a classic tale, while also returning in…
Given the ongoing international crisis unfolding in Ukraine, the films of Sergei Loznitsa — born in Belarus but raised in Kiev, and now living in…
Babi Yar. Context is another notable work from Loznitsa, one that represents an important act of remembrance while also remaining frustratingly vague and lacking in, ironically,…
Bergman Island Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally, an insular film. Set almost entirely on the island of Fårö, where the legendary Swedish filmmaker…
Much like the man at its center, State Funeral is an inscrutable, complex work. Josef Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, at his Kuntsevo dacha,…
Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s latest piece of archival “found footage” cinema would appear to have been taken straight from television. Edited together are a dozen…
Point and Line to Plane How does one give shape to one’s experience, one’s grief? The question persists through the films of Canadian director Sofia…
The Hollywood machine may be pumping its brakes right now — with an ever-growing list of release date delays announced across the next month and…
Our seventh and final dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth, our fifth, our sixth)…
It would be a mistake to overstate the similarities between the events presented in Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan — a series of non-violent protests gone awry in Kiev,…