The Happening, Part II: Goners with the wind
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.
Pennies from Heaven (1981)
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.
Return to Oz (1985)
This Disney production is remarkably dark and sophisticated, made during a brief period of a more adult approach to their live action family films. 11-year-old Fairuza Balk is absolutely enchanting as the resourceful heroine.
Agnès Varda in a box: Inhabiting TOUT(e) VARDA
«Her life as a mother dictated what spaces she would film in. Her feminist I takes place in the film, in the frame, behind and within the camera. Her installations are inhabitable, a shed of cinema to walk through and be within.»
The Happening, Part I: The twisted face of mankind
Say what you want about M. Night Shyamalan’s foray into disaster movie terrain, but its last 25 minutes are excellent, carefully walked through in this screenshot-based analysis.
Where Man Returns: Off the map it may be, but North Norwegian film is coming in from the cold!
TIFF 2019: When Man Returns may not sweep you away like some movie-land fairground rollercoaster, but it will take you on the kind of slow, arduous journey that is the hallmark of the North.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass: Fusion of shards
An initial response to the narratively complex and structurally beautiful Glass, which concludes the diverse trilogy of the meditative mood piece Unbreakable and the character-oriented suspense film Split.
The impeachment of Elio: Fruits and echoes in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name
This third and final piece will round up favourite moments, film-formal devices, and a large number of motifs, staging ideas, echoes and other structural properties that enrich this well-thought-out film.
Interlinked: Adapting the Cyberpunk World of Blade Runner
What happens as the cyberpunk elements in Blade Runner are adapted and changed in Blade Runner 2049, brought into both the fictional future Los Angeles, as well as the cultural context of 2017?
Because I wanted you to know: Staging Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name
Continuing our guide to this film, a look at the masterfully staged piazza scene where music and mise-en-scène interact, against a backdrop of motifs and echoes.
The Lighthorsemen (1987)
An excellent, visually ravishing Australian World War I film with an absolutely electrifying extended climax.
I remember everything: The many closures of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name
Through an abundance of visual examples, a guide to the film’s final scenes, revealing how not only its characters but the film itself is striving to achieve closure.
How singular confrontations embody goodness and achieve universality: Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult
«Because The Insult does not pretend to produce a message and only deals with the drama of individuals, it convokes the Lebanese history only through singular lives and makes us to bodily engage with some of its perspectives.»