Steven Spielberg is, inarguably, one of America’s most recognizable filmmakers in cinema history. This is not always indicative of a particular level of quality. We have all talked about the auteur theory to death, but all levels of talent can be recognized by visual style. Visuals are not the only …
Quentin Dupieux is not only an electronic musician (who earned a UK number one back in 1999) but also the finest surrealist filmmaker of our times. To say his movies are unpredictable, illogical, ridiculous and violent is an understatement. But their wildness and their misbehaviour has the feel of ordinary …
It was notable at this year’s Cannes how many movies re-examined France and the Second World War. It’s been obvious for some years now how the French film industry has been retelling its own stories and creating blockbusters for home audiences without caring too much about how they’ll land overseas. …
Director Marshall Curry is a veteran in the filmmaking industry. He is a four-time Academy Award nominee. Curry received two nominations for Best Documentary Feature with Street Fight and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. Another of his nominations was for Best Documentary Short Subject …
Tin Castle aka Irish Travellers is the very rare documentary worth seeing for its cinematography. Unfortunately the cinematography is the best thing about the film. Director Alexander Murphy also shot the film and some of its images are among the most surprisingly beautiful that have ever been captured in a …
The director Sebastian Brameshuber presents his new film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section. London portrays the life of a seventy-two-year-old man, Bobby Sommer, who drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, in Austria. He gives lifts to people traveling to these cities and he …
For a movie about the limits of memory, Blue Heron made the bad decision to be from the point of the youngest family member. That’s to say, the person present with the most limited understanding of what was happening while it was happening. The fact that the young daughter, Sasha …
Dollars to donuts director Rodrigo Sorogoyen was not happy to learn about Sentimental Value. Its brief outline is the same to that of The Beloved – volatile director tries to reconnect with his daughter by working with her on a movie – but of course Sentimental Value came out last …
On the weekend of August 21st, the Festival Bananada moved from multiple venues to the Centro Cultural Oscar Niemeyer, a traditional multicultural center in the city. The arena, the name of that space, hosted the most hyped bands and acts, drawing a massive crowd to the festival after a seven-year …
In 1999, Fabrício Nobre created the Festival Bananada in Goiânia, Goiás, a city near the country’s capital, Brasília. Despite its proximity to the center of Brazil, the town was not a place where bands, especially Rock and Punk bands, would play. The festival surged as part of the counterculture movement, …
The most shocking thing in Parallel Tales is Isabelle Huppert lighting a cigarette with a toaster. There’s a sense of unpredictability in that one moment that the rest of Parallel Tales was aiming for and somehow didn’t achieve. It’s hard to say why it falls so flat, since there is …
Movie revisionism runs on a very simple premise: give a flop enough time, and somebody will eventually decide it was misunderstood. The bombs of yesteryear will be embraced as bold pieces that were ahead of their time. There are many avenues through which revisionism takes place: a key anniversary that …
Alicia Vikander has had an impressive year of making extremely interesting choices but, with the noble exception of Hope, unfortunately those choices have not worked out. Some of that is because of the difficulty of the topics, but in the case of The Echo Chamber it’s because of its frightful …
Director Matt Sukkar is probably best known for the acclaimed documentary short, Durango, but he has recently turned his eye to features. In Sukkar‘s debut, The Deputy, viewers follow Toby, a very unprepared small-town lawman. Over the course of an endless night that starts with a missing dead body, he …
When a documentary film is about a filmmaker and their own family, there is really no way to critique the work of art without critiquing the people in it. That caveat, or concern, is especially important for Remake, the new documentary by Ross McElwee, who single-handedly changed the world of …
In the UK Sense and Sensibility has a U rating – suitable for all – which is the equivalent of an American G rating. For a movie about the romantic choices of two adult sisters this is an incredible achievement, even if it’s an adaption of a Jane Austen novel. …
It’s officially fall, and that means it’s Christmas movie season in my house. So it was an instant watch when I saw A Royal Date for Christmas in the Netflix carousel. This film originally aired on the Great American Family channel around Thanksgiving in 2023. Directed by Bradley Walsh and …
There was an unusual preoccupation with performance art at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Perhaps this is because performance art is by definition tied to a specific place, people and moment, providing an experience that can never be replicated. On the other hand, in a world where all our moments …
In the rich history of Brazilian filmmaking, animation is a medium that does not have as profound a filmography as others. Before the 2000s, there were very few examples, like Meow by Marcos Magalhães and Frankenstein Punk by Cao Hamburger and Eliana Fonseca. However, in the 2000s, the animation sector …
Emmanuel Marre won the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for A Man of His Time aka Notre Salut, because it does the impossible: it is a comedy about the slide into fascism. But the film is clearly of personal as well as professional importance to Mr. …