In the first part of a three-chapter conversation conducted over months via a large Google Doc, film critics Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman discuss what makes a writer’s voice, colleagues that keep inspiring them and how, a generation apart, they became interested in movies and writing.
“‘Z’ is thoughtful, provocative, impassioned entertainment, stylish and teeming with conviction.”
“‘The Breadwinner’ is a beautifully-constructed yet grueling story of female bravery that feels both timeless and timely.”
“For all its attempts at dissecting human cruelty, there’s no human core to this story, which makes its 135-minute runtime feel twice as long.”
“I’ll even go so far as to say that the sequel is just as satisfying as the original, in my eyes.”
“Ghost Dog glides through the story with the swiftness of an avian being in a film that never fails to be cathartic.”
“At some point, you’ve got to take down the celebrity posters, or at least reassess what they represent.”
“Within the context of a cinema that is high-strung and often defined by its over-the-top, spectacle-driven family dramas, ‘Ribbon’ and its smallness (and everydayness) is not just a refreshing break but an extremely well-timed breaking of the mold.”
“Renzu’s film gives a face to the thousands of women featured in the papers, disturbingly called ‘half widows’ — not just defined by the lack of a husband, but also by this ‘half,’ not full, not a complete status of being.”
“Although individual grief may be colored by guilt or loneliness, jealousy or the passage of time, ultimately everyone who knows love will know a ghost story, and suffer the same grief or become a ghost in the end.”
“If Murphy’s Law were to be made into a film, it’d look a lot like Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s ‘Long Live Brij Mohan!’ His production, in more ways than one, is also a metaphor for the city of Delhi.”
“The Hollywood dream lives on proudly in ‘The Disaster Artist.’”
“‘Village Rockstars’ represents a cultural category that is largely ignored by mainstream cinema and heralds a new chapter in the contemporary practice of serious filmmaking in India.”
“McDonagh’s film is as much of a message movie as summiting Mount Kilimanjaro is a relaxing family-friendly vacation.”
“A dance of layered visuals and eye-popping patterns, ‘Coco’ is well balanced with the understated”
“Achieving a vibrant mix of swooning sincerity and bitter irony, Feng Xiaogang’s ‘Youth’ walks the tightrope of Chinese history with a showman’s flair and a subversive wit, channelling its conflicting perceptions of the past into a single cohesive, ultimately jaded vision.”
“Martel’s film is an absolute masterpiece in visual symbolism and deserves to be seen on that basis alone.”
“It’s an odd little film, more melancholy and plaintive than outright scary or troubling, that slowly crawls under your skin.”
“Painfully ironic, aggressive and humorously on point, Östlund’s films are timely cinematic pieces that put their characters’ moral compasses at stake.”
“In ‘Crash,’ sex feels like a traffic accident. In ‘Videodrome,’ it becomes the subject of a warped, projected fantasy.”