Claymation, most readily identified for its craggy, almost comedic artificiality, can, in fact, most truthfully express our deepest and, at times, darkest emotions. The…
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined…
Once upon a time, the great François Truffaut said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The details of when he said this,…
At the end of the very first (of many) verbal arguments in Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, an emotionally potent chamber drama about three…
The increasingly ballooning runtimes of auteurist projects — specially made by those who belong to the ever-expanding School of Slow Cinema — inspire more…
Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a…
All the markers of a classic Coen Brothers’ crime comedy are there in Potsy Ponciroli’s Greedy People — the third film released this year…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First…
The most emotionally and spiritually invigorating faith-based films rely not on proselytization or condemnation, but on abstraction. Their dramatic force comes from their characters’…
Absence — no matter how great or small — creates mystery. Mystery inspires intrigue or, at the very least, interest. Interest encourages active engagement:…
Throughout Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, the softly croaky and comforting voice of Martin Scorsese repeatedly reminds us that the…
The documentarian’s camera — more often than not — observes, investigates, and deliberates in media res. The past, then, is either recounted through a…
The haunting lack of something or someone is ever-present in Tatiana Mazú González’s Every Document of Civilization. We first hear two female voices —…
The psychoanalytical turn of film theory in the 1970s, foundational to critical and theoretical film discourses on cinema to date, has always had a…
How does one approach a film that reveals everything about itself in its opening sequence? Do we applaud its ability to summarize its themes…
The specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) looms large over Chantal Akerman’s The Captive (2000). At times, it’s to such an extent that it…
Long heralded as the harbinger of snore-inducing boredom, slow cinema, in actuality, is a somewhat paradoxical replica of what film scholar Tom Gunning calls…
The depiction of grief in films is as variable as film form. It can be outwardly melodramatic like in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue…