“‘Museum of the Revolution’ has no moral or artistic responsibility to provide answers. But when almost none of these contemporary films even attempt to imagine an answer, one has to wonder where exactly we’re going wrong.”
“Melville’s Paris is a poetically insomniac version, one that I’m not sure ever really existed. The City of Light has been written about and filmed so much that one has long since forgotten what is real and what is urban legend.”
“In Mann’s world, the car and the computer seem to join forces to anonymize and obliterate the cost of human life outside of that space, enveloped in the fragmented, disintegrated aesthetic of early digital cinematography itself.”
“‘Pickup on South Street’ is perhaps the quintessential New York noir.”
“‘In Water’ is a slight and tiny whisp of a film in which very little happens and the most memorable facet is the out-of-focus anti-style. But in the context of a film festival, in the context of Hong’s career, the 2023 movie feels amusingly brilliant…”
“At its best, ‘Infinity Pool’ is astounding stuff, and one hopes Cronenberg senior is rightfully proud. But yet it is marred — not entirely, but enough — by a muddy texture at the sides, a failure of imagination and a cheap ethnic exoticism…”
“‘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.”
