Essays
Artwork by Neven Udovičić When writing criticism, finding the right words is part of the fun: investigating one’s feelings about a film to try and figure out what is really happening, what it is really doing, is incredibly satisfying, for both writers and then, hopefully, for the readers too.
Essays
A Croatian animated film reminds us of some of the things cinema can and routinely used to do When was the last time a striking visual composition quietly broke your mind, suggested new horizons, new images, new forms? For me, it was just yesterday — watching a film made 71 years
Essays
And so we have reached the 6th issue of Animus. The road to this moment has not been without difficulty, but the effort has always felt worthwhile, and the need to find ways to sort through the cinema of today has never felt more urgent. Though this issue includes five
Essays
A still from To The Moon (2021) I may be writing this essay at the tail end of 2021, but it already feels wrong to voluntarily think back on the year that has just passed. As Michael Sicinski puts it in his essay for Mubi Notebook, there do not seem
Essays
Ridley Scott's The Last Duel is a chance to rethink the place and definition of the auteur in Hollywood “Solid” is the word that is said the most when I ask some of the people who liked Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (most of them “millennians”) to
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In Claire Simon's I Want to Talk About Duras, love is a role to play Brian De Palma's Body Double is most often discussed as a film about film viewing and the illusion of control that voyeurism offers. When Craig Wasson’s Jake Scully indulges in
Essays
Still from Danses Macabres, Skeletons and Other Fantasies (2019) As I have been spending more time going out lately (and especially in October, hence the lack of a new issue that month), I have been experiencing that strange sense of disconnect one can sometimes feel not so much between who
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The American filmmaker discusses his most ambitious film to date Elena Lazic talks to Keep the Lights On (2012), Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016) director Ira Sachs about his film Frankie (2019), a bold cinematic feat that looks like just another “rich people on an exotic holiday”
Essays
Writing about films of the past should seek to expand our awareness of cinema and its possibilities, not freeze or constrict it The question of how to write about films of the past is of course an extremely loaded one. Even setting aside the issue of changing mores and the
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What really makes cinema 'personal'? It might be easier to celebrate the fact that blockbusters are no longer directed by white men who all look the same, if the companies that could still afford to make them were not soul-crushing corporations essentially using identity politics to legitimise their
Essays
On Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, the pleasures of talking head documentaries and the egomaniac viewer One of the most thrilling documentaries of the year comes in unassuming dress and hides in the too often neglected and underestimated corners of genre film festivals. Woodlands Dark and Days
Essays
The place of life in cinema and of cinema in life is a matter of "relating" This issue of Animus almost didn’t happen, due to “life” getting in the way — and as it turns out, how cinema can fit with or be excluded from other life matters