Reviews, interviews, rants: these articles do not fit into any specific category on the site, but they still had to be written.
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Following a shocking decision by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regional council, the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (Clermont ISFF) in France has just lost more than half of its 2023 funding from that council, per a press release from the collective Sauve qui peut le court-métrage. The reputation and value of Clermont
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It is tempting when writing about the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski to trade in very big concepts, which ultimately tell us little about the films themselves. A Kieślowski film cannot simply be a love story, it is about love. It isn’t that his films don’t invite this kind
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Grief is more than losing someone who meant a lot to you and seeing a void where they once were; it also involves figuring out what to do with the reminders and remainders of them, the traces they have left behind. It’s an impossible problem: that person is gone,
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This strange film begins like a slasher, four years before Hitchcock’s Psycho. A woman is found dead, killed in some unseen but brutal fashion by a man. A policeman on the scene talks of waves of such killings, which come and go without rhyme or reason. Though no one
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In M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, gay couple Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) and their young daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) have barely arrived in an isolated cabin in the woods when they are attacked by four strangers, who claim that if the family does not
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At the Marrakesh Film Festival, I took the opportunity to talk to Australian director Justin Kurzel, who was enjoying his first ever festival jury experience there, watching films alongside jury president Paolo Sorrentino, actors Vanessa Kirby, Diane Kruger, and Tahar Rahim, and filmmakers Nadine Labaki and Laïla Marrakchi. We talked
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Flamingo Road (1949) is a film noir / melodrama starring Joan Crawford as a woman who, through factors largely outside of her control, finds herself climbing the echelons of social life until she becomes what Joan Crawford always becomes: rich. But there is a price to pay, and this is a
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The story is what first catches the attention. A man who can draw his gun faster than anyone else finds himself forced to kill many others, in many American towns, as each new opponent tries and invariably fails to take his title. This premise would not be half as interesting
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At first glance, Robert Eggers’ The Northman does not seem all that different from other epic films set in the distant past, and comparisons to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator — as much from critics as from the film’s marketing team — are not totally unwarranted: in both films, the son of
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There are more important things than film. Nevertheless, film plays a role in things more important than itself, like nation building. Film plays a part in the process of reforging national and ethnic identities in the post-Soviet borderlands: Central Asia, Transcaucasia, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. Yet there is a
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In his op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Martin Scorsese tried to convince readers to go see Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley by writing that “the urgency and despair of then overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing.” I don’t
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When we first meet the beautiful Selma (Zoé Adjani), she is passing an oral exam for a prestigious economics school in Paris. Outside, she immediately sets her sights on a beautiful male student, and their brief chat is unapologetically horny. Later on, during what appears to be one of those