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
Director Peter Macdonald and executive assistant Madelyn Most discuss one of the best and most forgotten of JCVD's films There’s simply nothing expected about Legionnaire. It’s not directed by an ‘auteur’, but by Peter MacDonald, an industry veteran known predominantly for his work as a second-unit
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
Essays
On the liberating power and creative potential of the 'vacation film' The philosopher Vilém Flusser, in his essay ‘Taking Up Residence in Homelessness’, used Hegel to describe the double-bind of our ‘unhappy’ consciousness as a metaphorical dithering on the doorstep. To be within a space that is known
Essays
Mia Hansen-Løve's characters are all saved by her empathy for them It has always been a somewhat difficult and elusive task, attempting to describe precisely what is so distinctive and unique about the works of French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve. Over the course of just seven feature-length films, and
Essays
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
Essays
Lordan Zafranović's Occupation in 26 Pictures offers a refreshing and vital approach to history in cinema Films, TV, and perhaps in today’s age, social media, have a way of defining how we interpret, visualise and collectively memorialise the past far more concretely and definitively than the onerous,
Essays
Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine complicate our understanding of the relationship between pop culture and individuals In a West Village café, Todd Haynes once heard Karen Carpenter’s voice. “One day I was sitting at Café Dante … where they were playing 1970s retro music,
Essays
In Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill, tragedy is inherited The greatest melodramas are fatalistic in nature. In a certain sense, traceable from Vidor to Sirk to Nick Ray, they all traffic in inevitability. We know what will happen – or, at least, we are never too surprised when
Essays
Christina Newland looks back on an unusual but salutary edition of the Venice Film Festival There are a lot of ways to survive. In the long collective hibernation of the past 18 months or so, some have sought distraction, some strict routine, some online community; I guess I’ve tried
Essays
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