“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.”
VVoices #5: Film Critics List the Best Space Horror Movies
“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.”
VVoices #4: Film Critics React to the 2021 Oscar Nominations
“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.”
“How much is our response conditioned by our willingness to see causality in correlation, regardless of the original artistic intention?”
“Whether it is economic, ethnic or geopolitical, ‘The Heavy Burden’ keeps finding new ways to frame the marginal life of its protagonists.”
“In just 23 minutes, ‘Vader’ presents a nuanced and complex picture of fatherhood, as shaped by both individual personalities and wider social events.”
“Film criticism unable to confront film’s relationship to business is destined to fail and will continue to reproduce the same tired critiques of cinema.”