Last year, TIFF edged toward maybe considering reviving its terminated Masters program(me), not by putting the section back but by adding a sort of subcategory to a few of its films in other sections. Seven films were labeled Luminaries, which strikes me as a fine new name for the old section, one that avoids an...
2024-03-09 03:41:00 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Chris Lester
Last seen November 2003. Although it's unfair, when I watch The Age of Innocence I cannot help comparing it in my mind with Terence Davies' astonishing The House of Mirth. Every good literary adaptation is, in part, a work of literary criticism, and these two artists, Davies and Scorsese, took different lessons from Edith Wharton. Dav...
2024-03-08 05:40:20 +0000 UTC View Post
A film is always several things at once. To a great extent, it is a group of images and sounds that are assembled into a text, a piece of communication that has its own material relationships and formal coherence. But as a work of communication, a film always arrives within a social and cultural context. Mostly the text remains the same, even as the social situation shifts around it. This is w...
2024-03-07 03:04:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Maximum big surprise?
No, not exactly, but Arcadia is watchable enough, given that Zois lays out a number of worthy gimmicks and follows them where they'd logically go. If you ever plan on seeing this film (which I'd have bet the farm would end up in ND/NF, but what do I know), then you might want to check out here.
[SPOILERS FOLLOW]
- 2024-03-02 04:22:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Few academics in the humanities have had the impact, in their field and beyond it, that David Bordwell had. He and his partner Kristin Thompson essentially created a whole new discourse within film studies, one that has influenced several generations of scholars but also film critics, filmmakers, and ordinary cinephiles. His work was erudite but accessible, his argumentation clear as crystal and alw...
2024-03-01 23:32:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been meaning to leave a note here to acknowledge a situation that might be weird, although I certainly don't want it to be. A few of the recent choices from the subscriber lottery have been films that, as it turned out, I did not like very much. And I've been a little worried that the recommenders might think that I am disappointed in their choices, or that my opinion somehow represents...
2024-03-01 02:48:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Like many of you, I've been hearing about Joanna Arnow for a while now. In cinephile circles, her films I Hate Myself :) and Bad at Dancing have gotten an unusual amount of attention for narrative shorts. As you may know, the formidable Dan Sallitt is a fan, and he's a tough customer, not exactly Mikey the Life Cereal Kid tough, but highly discriminating to be sure. I haven't seen ...
2024-02-29 20:47:20 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Daniel
One of the reasons I enjoy the subscriber lottery so much is that I end up watching films I almost certainly wouldn't otherwise see. And even when I don't like those films -- and indeed, I did not care for The Aerial -- I find myself thinking about my preferences and why certain things rub me the wrong way. After all, taste is subjective and we shou...
2024-02-27 17:33:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Rojas' last film, A Sea of Glass, was one of my favorite films from 2023, and I fessed up to the fact that I wanted to program it in my Houston show, but was worried its length would be too daunting for the audience. As if answering my hesitancy with an elegant, pristine "screw you," Rojas has produced A Sense of Nothing, a film every bit as exquisite as A Sea of Glass. It ...
2024-02-25 05:50:40 +0000 UTC View Post
My feelings about Club Zero, which are conflicted but nevertheless quite negative, prompted me to go back to Jessica Hausner's debut, a film that I recall getting quite a bit of love on the festival circuit back in the day. Lovely Rita does give a pretty clear idea of where Hausner came from, artistically speaking. That would be Austria, and although Lovely Rita is consider...
2024-02-23 00:19:45 +0000 UTC View Post
If you haven't yet read Phil Coldiron's piece in Cinema Scope #97, on the films of Ross Meckfessel, well, you should. But I mention it here because Phil's discussion of Meckfessel seems relevant to considering Calum Walter's latest film. The article describes open montage, an editing s...
2024-02-22 06:43:32 +0000 UTC View PostThe somewhat anonymous Mexican experimental film group Colectivo Los Ingrávidos are astonishingly prolific. When one checks in with their Vimeo page, it's often the case that the group have posted a sudden spate of new works. Some of them are fully digital, while others at least originate on celluloid. But I think most observers agree that this relentless productivity comes at a cost. Los Ingrávidos works often display a remarkable tactility and an all-too-rare alchemy with respect to the c...
2024-02-21 05:35:53 +0000 UTC View Post
There still remains one selector from the previous batch, but I wanted to go ahead and line up the next three deciders.
As always, contact me either through Patreon messages or email (mjsicinski@gmail.com) and let me know what you'd like to me to watch and review.
Thanks all!
#27: AUSTIN LANDRY
#58: DANIEL CLEMENS
#46: CHRIS LEST...
2024-02-20 19:06:53 +0000 UTC View Post
"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." (Walter Benjamin)
I have little doubt that Jessica Hausner, who is clearly a talented and intelligent filmmaker, would be horrified by the insinuation that her new film Club Zero is an act of right-wing trolling. And...
2024-02-18 07:09:34 +0000 UTC View Post
It's another InRO special, this time permitting me to go long, and hopefully deep, on one of Brakhage's first definitive works. Here's a sample:
"It may be reductive to compare Schoenberg’s break with tonality with Brakhage’s development of a radically new cinematic language, one that largely abandoned such fundamentals as narrative, character, and coherent spatial orientation. But there is...
2024-02-15 21:40:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Obviously there's a great deal to be said about Warren Sonbert's films on a formal level. His montage style was utterly unique in that it created small time-events while also avoiding linear narrative. Any two shots in Short Fuse could be analyzed according to Eisensteinian principles. Long shots tend to follow close-ups; unmoving shots follow movement or tracking shots; verticals are oppose...
2024-02-14 18:39:40 +0000 UTC View Post
ABOVE: a vaguely phallic swimming pool
I must admit, I am not sure there is any version of this film I would have really appreciated. How to Have Sex is a young person's film, and the primary concerns of its protagonists are of very little concern to me. This alone is hardly disqualifying, but perhaps in trying to be highly specific in her approach, Manning Walker seems to ado...
2024-02-14 05:32:41 +0000 UTC View Post
It's a familiar gambit. A first-time filmmaker, uncertain that the funding vicissitudes of venture capital will ever allow him another at-bat, throws every stray idea into the debut, some sticking and others not. However, with Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Vietnamese director Phạm Thiên Ân takes this approach to the extreme. Over a frequently gorgeous, often engrossing, but ultimately ...
2024-02-14 02:26:53 +0000 UTC View PostWelp. With the official end of Cinema Scope after 25 years, In Review Online is now my main pipeline for getting my work into the wider world. (Granted, I am usually too busy to pitch stories or hit up editors, so if anyone on here has any tips or suggestions, I'd certainly appreciate it.)
Anyhow, here's some stuff I have up.
BY REQUEST: Maxwell S.
I'm not sure exactly how long ago I first saw Maborosi, since I only have screening logs going back to 2001. I am fairly sure it was the second Koreeda film I saw, going back to it after seeing (and very much enjoying) After Life in first-run at the Castro. A lot of it came back to me on this, my second viewing, at least 23 years later. ...
2024-02-09 05:16:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I found Priscilla rote and rather tedious, I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be the film of Coppola's that gains admirers in subsequent decades. It is a distillation of the director's stylistic fascinations -- female identity, solitude, stiflingly perfect art direction and mise-en-scene. At the same time it clearly aims for greater accessibility and a wider audience. This is ...
2024-02-04 04:09:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, so Origin is not a good film. There are a lot of things wrong with it. But it is also a very weird film.
I have not read Isabel Wilkerson's book, so I am unable to speak to the nuances of her caste theory. However, as presented in DuVernay's film, its problems are fairly apparent. The impetus for this rethinking of race, apparently, was Wilkerson's confusion over German antisemit...
2024-02-04 03:35:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Above is the lone film still available for India Donaldson's Sundance premiere Good One. This is unfortunate, because I want to talk about a very specific scene at the start of the film's final third. The three hikers -- Sam (Lily Collias), her father Chris (James Le Gros), and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) arrive at a clearing beside a stream. All around the stream we see small cairns ma...
2024-02-01 21:46:46 +0000 UTC View Post
As usual, in my Writing 1302 courses we are studying documentary form. Since the students have to write a final research paper, I find it useful for them to examine documentaries, good and bad, in order to understand how arguments are constructed and how they incorporate evidence. And although it's a much denser read than it needs to be, I always assign this essay by Bill Nichols called 2024-02-01 19:39:01 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Nicki Duval
If I had been seduced, or even intrigued, by the music under consideration in this lo-fi doc, I might've been able to overlook its formal and technical shortcomings. But the acts profiled -- Theo Burt, Mark Fell, Lorenzo Senni, and EVOL -- fall between chairs for me. To hear them talk, they mostly seem to be looking for ways to jump off from more convent...
2024-01-29 02:45:23 +0000 UTC View Post
I did the lottery a bit different this time. Since Patreon now allows unpaid subscribers (who are pretty much just alerted when I post something), I decided to include them in the drawing, since who knows? That might be the nudge that prompts them to subscribe.
However, there is no way to list just the paying and free subscribers, and eliminate the former ones. So I drew from everyone, past and...
2024-01-25 21:58:07 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Daniel Gorman
If we take the position that essay films are essentially like written essays, only using visual and auditory input as part of their argumentative structure, then essay films ask to be read with a critical eye and this includes rhetorical analysis. Is the film structured in the best possible way to put its point across? Are there elements that detract f...
2024-01-25 20:41:27 +0000 UTC View Post
It seems that Black Girl, Ousmane Sembène's debut featurette, is destined to be his consensus masterpiece. While the cynical streak in me wonders whether Black Girl's brevity plays a role in it being the director's most widely seen film, I think there's much more to it. I finally caught up with Black Girl, a good twenty years since first discovering Sembène's films throug...
2024-01-22 05:19:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Ideologically, the polar opposite of Air, although perhaps the comparison is unfair. But where the Nike film mobilized and fetishized the past to release endorphins of nostalgia, Are You There God? returns to a point in history that is selected because of its difference from our own time. In our hour of need, Kelly Fremon Craig (re)turns to Judy Blume, because she reflects a very di...
2024-01-22 00:34:06 +0000 UTC View Post
We all know that the film industry and younger audiences are increasingly squeamish about overt depictions of sexuality on screen, so much so that Ira Sachs' Passages, a solid enough film on its own terms, was hailed by critics as something radical and transgressi...
2024-01-21 23:56:00 +0000 UTC View Post