Review: Karim Aïnouz’s ‘Mariner of the Mountains’
“A sense of unfulfilled longing characterizes ‘Mariner of the Mountains,’ and results in a film in which everything is tantalizingly incomplete, the way many lives are.”
Fedor Tot
‘Coach to Vienna’ and the Muddied Waters of History
“The power of ‘Coach to Vienna’ today rests in its mythic quality. The crux of the story may well be placed in the ‘real,’ but the affect of the mise-en-scène is that of a murderous fable.”
Berlinale 2022: ‘No Angels’ Retrospective and Carole Lombard
“Carole Lombard’s performances — even when placed in manic films such as ‘Twentieth Century’ — are so often understated that you barely even notice half of the choices made.”
Berlinale Review: Ulrich Seidl’s ‘Rimini’
“By dint of the fact that ‘Rimini’ showcases such a vast gulf between performance and direction, Seidl’s return to fictional filmmaking is, if nothing else, hugely interesting.”
Interview with ‘Assault’ Director Adilkhan Yerzhanov
‘Assault’ Interview: Fedor Tot discusses the 2022 film with filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov.
IFFR Review: Alberto De Michele’s ‘The Last Ride of the Wolves’
“More moralistic viewers might question if ‘The Last Ride of the Wolves’ is in reality glamorizing these men, but I think Di Michele is a couple of steps ahead, both embracing that glamorization and distancing the audience from it.”
Sarajevo Film Festival Review: Marija Zidar’s ‘Reconciliation’
“‘Reconciliation’ exists in a curious middle ground, stuck between the effectiveness of its craft and touching, humanist storytelling and the wider narrative desires that pull both artists and audiences to these stories.”
Cinema Rediscovered: ‘No Place Like Home’
“For a film completed in fits and starts over so many years, there’s a remarkable intellectual coherence to ‘No Place Like Home.'”
Cinema Rediscovered: ‘The Story of a Three-Day Pass’
“The cultural energy of the French New Wave is all over ‘The Story of a Three-Day Pass,’ not least because Van Peebles moved to Paris with his young family and published four novels in French as he was learning the language.”
Why Criticism: The Difficulties of Depicting Genocide in ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ and ‘La Llorona’
“Roger Ebert once wrote ‘it’s not what a film is about, it’s how it is about it,’ and it’s this phrase that I usually return to when thinking about cinema that deals with humanity’s worst impulses.”
A Wild Ride in the Bullpen: How a Young Pedro Almodóvar Upended Genre and Gender
“For all the praise showered on Almodóvar’s later work, it lacks the wildness, freshness and exuberance of his 80s filmography, which often feels unfairly overlooked as a result.”
Antonio and Almodóvar
Fedor Tot on Pedro Almodóvar’s Collaborations with Antonio Banderas
Encounters Film Festival: ‘Betty’ and the Failed Romance Movie
“‘Betty,’ through the simplest of guises — bare-bones animation, a bit of music and a wry, haphazard director’s commentary — is an impressive feat of doing a lot with extremely little.”
Encounters Film Festival: Science Fiction and Islam Meet in ‘So What If the Goats Die?’
“How much is our response conditioned by our willingness to see causality in correlation, regardless of the original artistic intention?”
Encounters Film Festival: The Importance of Geopolitics, Poverty and Donkeys in ‘The Heavy Burden’
“Whether it is economic, ethnic or geopolitical, ‘The Heavy Burden’ keeps finding new ways to frame the marginal life of its protagonists.”
Encounters Film Festival: Troubled Pasts and Open Futures Collide in ‘Father’
“In just 23 minutes, ‘Vader’ presents a nuanced and complex picture of fatherhood, as shaped by both individual personalities and wider social events.”
Why Criticism: Film as a Business First
“Film criticism unable to confront film’s relationship to business is destined to fail and will continue to reproduce the same tired critiques of cinema.”
Emir Kusturica’s ‘Underground’: 25 Years Later
“‘Underground’ remains a controversial and wildly ambitious film, one that refuses to be pinned down. It’s a never-ending hall of mirrors that reveals more about the audience than the narrative itself.”