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
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
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