Longform writing is the raison d'être of Animus. These free-to-access essays, by writers from around the world, cut through the noise and are guaranteed to be worth your time.
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
The ways in which the stories of three queer artists and groups are brought to light offer a fuller understanding of what it means to be queer Three documentaries released in 2021 — Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, The Velvet Underground, and No Ordinary Man — examine queer artists
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
Essays
Two directors from different parts of the world, with very different outputs and reputations, absorbed and re-interpreted the culture of their respective countries in contrasting but not entirely dissimilar ways While director Jean-Pierre Melville was French, very sophisticated and, at least eventually, respected by cinephiles the world over, English-born Australian
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
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
Martin Scorsese's film presents a model of woman- and motherhood as tender as it is strong Only the fourth of Martin Scorsese’s dozens of feature-length narrative films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has become somewhat overshadowed in his catalogue simply due to the stature of the
Essays
With Andrzej Żuławski's film enjoying renewed popularity in 2021, Daniel Bird sets the record straight on the history of the film's way to screens big and small On November 1, 2021 the critic/programmer Forrest Cardamenis tweeted the following: No judgment here, but it’s really
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 supposed