Essays
Promotional picture for My Six Convicts (1952) One of the most striking sections of this year’s edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, the repertory film festival that takes place annually in Bologna, Italy, was the series on director Hugo Fregonese. Born in Argentina but working in Hollywood in the years
Essays
Artwork by Neven Udovičić Few films that purport to “blur the boundaries between fiction and reality” ever go beyond stating the fact that much of reality is fake or performative, and that, conversely, a lot of what we assume to be entirely artificial is in fact the most true. That
Essays
Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović on her film Murina Over the course of a few days, existing tensions between a father and his teenage daughter escalate to a point of crisis. It sounds like a straightforward coming-of-age story, but it is not. Here, the person throwing tantrums and acting irrationally
Essays
Artwork by Neven Udovičić Again morning — sun-draped terrace — Sapphire sea — all the world on a holiday — Rifle Fire — Brooding doves — Brutality of man — and still the sun. Intertitle from Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) Summer is here! In the Northern hemisphere, the weather is getting warmer, the sky
Essays
Billy Ray's Shattered Glass centres something more important than affability Another film could have told the story of The New Republic prodigy and serial liar Stephen Glass with bombastic, paranoia-tinged intensity, the kind that defines Alan Pakula’s trilogy of films about far-reaching corruption. Or it could have
Essays
Peter Weir's Fearless formally and narratively brings up the challenges of being a person in the world, unavoidably tangled up in the problems of other people’s lives Peter Weir’s Fearless centres on a plane crash survivor who is, indeed, fearless, because he feels himself to be
Essays
Artwork by Neven Udovičić The line that connects the idea of cinema as an empathy machine to the plague of “nicecore” kino (which Animus contributor Charles Bramesco wrote about so forcefully here) is the horizon beyond which an apparently large number of film viewers (and reviewers) are not inclined to
Essays
The director tells us about her unique, visceral portrait of a young boy growing up in Naples' Spanish quarters One of the most striking offerings at last year’s London Film Festival, Nascondino (aka Hide and Seek), from London-based director Victoria Fiore, is doubly powerful: its portrait of a
Essays
Three recent films set in Croatia and Bosnia look at the peculiar, frustrating situation of their younger generation One could be forgiven for imagining that the behaviour of the father character in Murina, the feature debut from Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, is far-fetched. Short-tempered and aggressive, Ante (Leon Lucev)
Essays
Artwork by Neven Udovičić “Acting is really hard to talk about,” Isaac Butler tells Claire Davidson in his interview about his new book on Method acting, and he is right. Which is why it is a point of pride to publish three essays in this month’s issue that touch
Essays
A few films at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival ran against the dominant idea of a utilitarian, simplistic cinema Making films anywhere is difficult and expensive, and in any given year — though perhaps now more than ever, two years into a pandemic — the selection at the Sundance Film Festival shows
Essays
A new documentary purporting to expose the sexism inherent in certain filmmaking techniques turns out to be an enemy to media literacy ‘The trap of representation’ in cinema at large and in Hollywood in particular is usually understood to mean the way in which increased presence on screens does not