“‘Saint Omer’ isn’t a film that looks at gendered and racial dynamics in the courtroom; it’s a film that looks at the ideological puppet strings that define those gendered and racial dynamics beyond immediate visibility.”
“Poitras avoids melodrama, catharsis and sensationalism in ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.’ The result is acutely devastating.”
“Given Araya’s small-scale origins in a country without a major film industry, it remains a fascinating testament to both the lives of the peninsula’s inhabitants and the film’s own creation.”
Cinema Rediscovered Essay by Fedor Tot | Women-Led Films of the 1930s | Jewel Robbery (1932) | Red-Headed Woman (1932) | Baby Face (1933)
“Hugo Fregonese is a director ripe for rediscovery.”
“Do some films get ignored because they are unavailable or do they get ignored because they aren’t that good to begin with? This is precisely where I stand with ‘Tony Arzenta.'”
“Nomi of ‘Showgirls’ and Betty of ‘Mulholland Dr.’ seem to be communicating with each other across space and time, from entirely different films yet resolutely from within the same universe.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
‘Assault’ Interview: Fedor Tot discusses the 2022 film with filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov.
“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.”
“‘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.”
“For a film completed in fits and starts over so many years, there’s a remarkable intellectual coherence to ‘No Place Like Home.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Fedor Tot on Pedro Almodóvar’s Collaborations with Antonio Banderas
“‘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.”
