«Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019) pulls back the commercial façade to provide another sort of experience, one you won’t find in any tourist brochure or its cousin, the feel-good movie.»
Cannes 2020: Limitations creates opportunity. From 12 to 23 May we were supposed to be in Cannes and do our usual coverage on new film art, but if we can’t go to Cannes – what if Cannes comes to us? Here’s this year’s alternative Cannes official selection.
Not only will this article eschew politics, morals and messages, it will map out the abundance of virtues of Joker without at all relying on Joaquin Phoenix’s monumental performance.
Is the Norwegian film establishment playing it too safe? Either way Kerren Lumer-Klabbers’s A Stone Slowly Falls – the only Norwegian film in Karlovy Vary – is a pleasing, self-contained episode, visually arresting, narratively simple but complete.
Venice 2019: Defined by its plurality – of perspectives, of themes, of ages – Barn moves out of step, like a knight on a chess board.
Karlovy Vary 2019: Fact-finding filmmakers everywhere are revealing what you’re really up to, and it is their dubious claim to being fiction (or fabrication) free that makes them so dangerous.
Lars Klevberg’s debut feature does not succeed fully as a horror film but is highly impressive in its mise-en-scène and sophisticated, subdued and moody aesthetics.
Éric Rohmer’s films are known for their talkative characters, but in L’ami de mon amie (1987) it is evident that the movie’s visuals are as important in telling the story.
A final look at M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, this time its formal approach with a special emphasis on his inventive use of point-of-view shots, stealthy camera movements, overhead and underhead shots, and many other subtleties.
A Shyamalan enthusiast is struggling mightily to come to terms with the conundrum of The Happening, a split identity film that swings wildly between excellence, rampant quirkiness and unchecked hysteria.
Tom Volf’s film Maria by Callas is by no means the first documentary about Maria Callas, by many considered to be the twentieth century’s greatest opera singer. Why, then, make yet another film?
A guide to the many powerful suicide scenes, including the brilliant, icily electrifying opening where normality turns into nightmare. Plus motifs, visual ideas and references to earlier Shyamalan works.
The hero of this brilliant, darkly poetic musical is fantastically arrogant, loutish, self-centred, self-pitying and pathetic, played by Steve Martin as totally captive of his dreams and desires.