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 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
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,