Crime Scene #7: ‘Twilight’ and the Hungarian Hills
“In ‘Twilight,’ Fehér suggests, the force of authority truly loses its voice.”
Crime Scene #6: ‘Time and Tide’ – A Hong Kong Elegy
“‘Time and Tide’ seems to gaze both forward and backwards at once, its breaking down of editing structure creating a strange discombobulating effect.”
Crime Scene #5: ‘Branded to Kill’ and Tokyo Teardowns
“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.”
Forbidden Worlds Film Festival: ‘Cliffhanger,’ Sylvester Stallone and Realism
“‘Cliffhanger’ is emblematic of a specific kind of big-budget Hollywood blockbuster that was very much in vogue at the time: dumb, full of testosterone and British villains.”
Crime Scene #4: ‘Amsterdamned’ – The City Is Always Sinking
“‘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.”
Review: Srđan Keča’s ‘Museum of the Revolution’
“‘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.”
Crime Scene #3: ‘Bob le Flambeur’ and the Death of Paris
“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.”
Crime Scene #2: ‘Collateral,’ Cars and Computers
“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.”
Crime Scene: ‘Pickup on South Street’ and New York Networks
“‘Pickup on South Street’ is perhaps the quintessential New York noir.”
Berlinale Review: Hong Sang-Soo’s ‘In Water’
“‘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…”
Berlinale Review: Brandon Cronenberg’s ‘Infinity Pool’
“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…”
London Film Festival Review: Alice Diop’s ‘Saint Omer’
“‘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.”
London Film Festival Review: Laura Poitras’ ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’
“Poitras avoids melodrama, catharsis and sensationalism in ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.’ The result is acutely devastating.”
A Film Arising from the Sea and the Sand: ‘Araya’ at Cinema Rediscovered
“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.”
Pre-Code Prime Cuts: Women-Led Films at Cinema Rediscovered
Cinema Rediscovered Essay by Fedor Tot | Women-Led Films of the 1930s | Jewel Robbery (1932) | Red-Headed Woman (1932) | Baby Face (1933)
Vagabond Noirs and Tramp Westerns: The Films of Hugo Fregonese at Il Cinema Ritrovato
“Hugo Fregonese is a director ripe for rediscovery.”
Il Cinema Ritrovato: ‘Tony Arzenta’ and Recanonizing Italian Genre Cinema
“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.'”
Blonde Ambition: ‘Showgirls’ and ‘Mulholland Dr.’ as Two Sides of the Same Coin
“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.”
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.”
‘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.”