Essays
Eyes Wide Shut is New York back lot Pauline Kael’s review of Blade Runner, from 1982, contains a complaint that sounds to me more like a compliment, or even a clue: “We’re always aware of the sets as sets.” The future Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s sci-
Essays
French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung pushes the boundaries of sound and vision to evoke bodily sensations in his breakthrough feature The Scent of Green Papaya Film is a medium that engages with two of the fundamental human senses: sight and sound. And yet in his Camera D’Or-winning
Essays
The Italian director retraces Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final journey during a spellbinding long take in his breakthrough film Dear Diary Extended sequences perform differently in different films: in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, a long shot of the main character lying in silence in a dell seems to conjure up
Essays
Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds offers a welcome corrective to the patronising poverty porn of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, stars non-professional actor and real-life rodeo Brady Jandreau in the
Essays
“She doesn’t just tell us a story, she tells us about a feeling” A conversation with French director Emmanuel Finkiel about his film Memoir of War, adapted from a Marguerite Duras novel, where feelings are as treacherous as words Mélanie Thierry plays a version of Marguerite Duras herself in
Essays
Senses run through this second issue of Animus. Mark Asch writes beautifully about the doubt that so troubles Tom Cruise’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, an anxiety which only the certitude of bodily sensations can quell. James King meanwhile explores The Scent of Green Papaya, a
Essays
Burt Lancaster swims out of oblivion In the beginning was a stream with a deer lapping at the water’s edge in a forest. Music floods the bucolic scene with melancholy, while a gliding camera offers the point of view of a man whose feet crunch through the leaves that
Essays
We are all drowning in an ocean of weak tea It is incumbent upon a critic working in the year 2021 to maintain a healthy skepticism toward overly romanticised views of the past, difficult as the archival stills of Times Square marquees from the ‘70s might make that for us.
Essays
Abel Ferrara and Gianfranco Rosi offer attention and forgiveness in Bad Lieutenant and El Sicario, Room 164 Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant is bluntly titled: its protagonist is just bad, there is no way around it. Even the term “antihero” feels too generous for this drugged up lieutenant
Essays
Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin and the Adam Sandler vehicle That's My Boy are two sides of the same strange coin when it comes to the treatment of trauma on film TW: childhood sexual abuse, rape, paedophilia In 1980s California, Donny, a boy of no more than
Essays
Communication breaks down in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy Of all the latent social problems brought to the surface by the pandemic and by the forced isolation that so many experienced in 2020 and into 2021, the challenges of communication may not appear to be the
Essays
The first part in a series on what exactly we are trying to do here Early in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the director talks about his childhood as a film-obsessed youth and the big book about movies that he liked to peruse at length