Daniele Luchetti’s Confidenza let’s slip love’s fearful, darker side
KVIFF 2024: Confidenza has a remarkable capacity to challenge spectators to push their own boundaries and rethink their sense of self and social connection.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin: Seven towards the apocalypse
While waiting for Trap, have a look at the director’s previous film, which powerfully taps into highly topical, online-fuelled phenomena like irreconcilable world views, gaslighting and conspiracy theories.
Lilja Ingolfdottir’s debut feature Elskling is so good, we just have to pull it apart!
KVIFF 2024: On the one hand, Lilja Ingolfdottir’s Elskling («Loveable») provides a remarkably vivid case-study of mixed-up, complex and always flawed humanity. On the other, it shows us convincingly how some of the most destructive and self-destructive tendencies might be reined in.
Karlovy Vary 2024: ‘It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…’
KVIFF 2024: Back to my people, my Brigadoon-style episodic community, my lovely, fragile, tragicomic festival! What follow are the confessions of a diehard festival-head.
TIFF’s Silent Film Days 2024: Rediscover the true revolutionary space for our times
«We could do a lot worse than come together with the living cinematic remains of a few notable kindred spirits, here in the ghostly, life-affirming audiovisual exuberance of Tromsø’s Silent Film Days.»
The Dupes by Tawfiq Saleh: More Tired Than Anyone Should Be
Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes (1972) serves as a reminder of cinema’s potential to incite social change and foster cross-cultural empathy. By amplifying Palestinian voices and challenging dominant narratives, it advocates for human rights and justice.
Mesmerised by the movies: An interview with David Bordwell
The enormously influential film scholar David Bordwell passed away just a few days ago. This massive interview from 2004, never before published in English, makes for a snapshot of his personality and cinematic vision.
Sweeping gender – Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex and the rise of a new trilogy
Berlinale 2024: People in Sex, the new film by Dag Johan Haugerud, build an entire rhythm out of talking – not just about the act of sex itself, but rather about notions of identity, social norms and the purview of modern masculinity.
Portals to enchanted realms: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron
In the realm of cinematic farewells, The Boy and the Heron stands as a poignant adieu from the masterful hand of Hayao Miyazaki.
A meticulous exposé of virulent fundamentalism: Tonje Hessen Schei & Michael Rowley’s Praying for Armageddon
Tonje Hessen Schei and Michael Rowley’s Praying for Armageddon (2023) shines a piercing cinematic light on the madness as well as the astonishing influence exercised by this particular brand of religious fundamentalism.
BIFF 2023: Fight the power with documentary film!
BIFF 2023: Bergen International Film Festival is renowned for its documentaries, great vehicles for challenging authority, fighting the good fight. This year Åsmund Hasli’s Ping Pong Family and Sharon Roggio’s 1946: The Mistranslation that Changed Culture were two of the highlights.
Marx, Coca-Cola, and the Postmodern Space in Between: Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin
By acknowledging itself as spectacle and as the product of an inherent contradiction between a radical message and commodified medium, Masculin féminin cements itself as a thoroughly postmodern work.