Active Vague Visages Film Columns
“The spatial detail in ‘Five Deadly Venoms,’ aided by Chang’s sharp sense of timing, helped the film become a surprisingly labyrinthine vision of camaraderie in the face of corruption and power.”
“‘In the Land of Saints and Sinners’ truly sings during its quietest moments.”
“It’s a sense of Korean specificity that defines ‘Memories of Murder,’ which is still the best of Bong’s films.”
“‘Amores Perros’ is almost entirely disinterested in its central location. It feels like a film made not to speak truth to Mexican audiences, but to present a hyperreal version of Mexico for international audiences.”
“Kim mostly hits the mark with ‘Man on the Run,’ even if some of the Adam McKay-style filmmaking choices don’t land particularly well.”
“‘Case of the Naves Brothers’ is hardly in the annals of great Brazilian cinema, like the works of Rocha, but it absolutely deserves to be seen in the same breath.”
“John Huston’s 1948 film ‘Key Largo’ is yet another classical Hollywood studio system film in which barely a single frame was shot on location.”
“‘Red Rooms’ provides a perfect recipe for isolation and alienation, encouraged by a media world around us that seeks only to capture attention and never thoughts.”
“‘Detour’ plays like a fever dream powered by guilt and dread; an existential noir about an American male lost in the nothingness and vastness of the country.”
“In ‘Twilight,’ Fehér suggests, the force of authority truly loses its voice.”
“‘Time and Tide’ seems to gaze both forward and backwards at once, its breaking down of editing structure creating a strange discombobulating effect.”
“Discordant, broken, berserk: ‘Branded to Kill’ refuses all direct relations with geography in its depiction of a career hitman on the verge of losing control.”
“‘Amsterdamned’ can’t decide if it wants to embrace those who interact with the city or kill them, and this contradiction is part of the film’s slimy, schlocky charm.”
“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.”
The Art of the Score #3: Blake Howard on Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Logan Lucky’
Nicole Rodenburg Interview: A conversation about movie collecting with Vague Visages contributor Greg Carlson.
“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.”
Greg Carlson Interviews Filmmaker Toby Jones About Movie Collecting