Hard Truths
When Curry Barker’s Obsession (2025) came out in cinemas a few months ago, a small debate emerged online about audience reactions and the director’s intentions. Was this a film about dating a “crazy” girlfriend, or about misogynistic fantasies of domination and control? Although most online discourse could do
Hard Truths
Elena and Manuela try on a looser podcasting style in Bologna, at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Among the topics they cover are: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, libraries, file sharing, budding cinephiles, Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans,
Hard Truths
As Elena’s season Finding Your Way: The Films of Peter Weir was winding down at the BFI Southbank in London, she joined Manuela to talk some more about the cinema of this fascinating Australian filmmaker, from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, to Fearless, Witness to
Hard Truths
French filmmaker Maurice Pialat initially wanted to be a painter. He did not fulfill that dream, and it’s hard not to trace at least part of his legendary anger and bitterness back to this early frustration. Centred on protagonists who can be brutal with one another as they cope
Hard Truths
Is love real, or a socially accepted form of delusion? Is there such a thing as chemistry, or are random encounters only perceived as meaningful connections through the lens of expectation and memory? Is romance a choice, or written in the unalterable script of our destiny? As Richard Linklater’s
Hard Truths
Gleefully playing with established tropes, the three films Elena and Manuela discuss in this new episode of Hard Truths toe the line between comedy and terror, irony and sincerity, fiction and reality: early true crime spoof Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel, 1992), meta franchise sequel Wes Craven’
Hard Truths
It’s only a matter of time before Joachim Trier wins a Best Picture Oscar. In this new episode of Hard Truths, Elena and Manuela damn the Norwegian director with faint praise but also give him his flowers as they discuss three of his best known films: Oslo, August 31st
Hard Truths
What unites the three apparently very different films of this 10th, Jukebox episode of Hard Truths? In Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), Sean Connery plays a detective-sergeant who has seen too much. Milton Moses Ginsberg’s underseen, Rip Torn-starring arthouse gem Coming Apart (1969) charts the psychological
Extras
Manuela reports on some striking performances seen in Bologna.
Extras
Grief is more than losing someone who meant a lot to you and seeing a void where they once were; it also involves figuring out what to do with the reminders and remainders of them, the traces they have left behind. It’s an impossible problem: that person is gone,
Essays
In this French film, the pragmatic choice to leave one’s home when it is under attack feels anything but rational Tearjerkers, as the crude word suggests, tend to be movies that tug at your heartstrings so forcefully that pure sadness overwhelms you. After the credits roll, however, you can
Essays
A selection of films at the 2021 Frames of Representation film festival in London offer fascinating avenues for documentary cinema As documentaries (or, rather, certain kinds of documentaries) have entered the mainstream in a big way in recent years, so has the basic and self-evident “problem” of documentary’s