Lost in the Moment: Peter Mettler on The End of Time
After travelling through such far-flung sites as Detroit, Hawaii, India, and the geek-tacular labyrinth that is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Peter Mettler’s latest documentary finally...
View ArticleWandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure of Museum Hours
“Kunsthistorisches. It’s the big old one.” This is how Vienna’s massive, venerable, lovely and, indeed, elderly central art museum is termed in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, and it neatly sums up the...
View ArticleGolden Girls: Sean Baker’s Starlet
The opening shot of Sean Baker’s fourth feature Starlet is beautiful, and not just because it (eventually) rests on Dree Hemingway. Underneath dreamy, faintly menacing music by Manual, we fade up on a...
View ArticleHe and “I”: Joaõ Pedro Rodrigues and Joaõ Rui Guerra da Mata on The Last Time...
By Aaron Cutler “Goodbye Lady from Macao” reads a newspaper headline at the end of Joaõ Pedro Rodrigues and Joaõ Rui Guerra da Mata’s short Red Dawn (2011), an unnervingly straightforward view of fish...
View ArticleFind Me Guilty: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing
By Adam Nayman Like most other documentaries about people who are certifiably insane, The Act of Killing raises questions about the exploitation of its subjects. Namely: Is it even possible to exploit...
View ArticleNo Sound Is Innocent: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio
By Jason Anderson A cunningly crafted, slyly satirical, and deeply unsettling tale of a movie sound engineer losing his grasp on reality amid the obsolete tools of cinema’s analogue age, Berberian...
View ArticleAntoine Bourges on East Hastings Pharmacy
By Michael Vass When Paris-born filmmaker Antoine Bourges moved from Montréal to Vancouver in 2006, he ended up living and working near the infamous Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. This led Bourges to...
View ArticleForced Exchange: Nicolás Pereda and Jacob Schulsinger on Killing Strangers
By Adam Cook Now in its fourth year, DOX:LAB is an initiative of Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX documentary film festival that pairs a European and non-European filmmaker together to collaborate on a film via a...
View ArticleAfter-School Special: Joseph Kahn’s Detention
By Adam Nayman No American filmmaker in recent years has put his money where his mouth is like Joseph Kahn, the director of music videos for artists including Britney Spears, Destiny’s Child, Eminem,...
View ArticleMiddlegame: An Interview with Andrew Bujalski
By Phil Coldiron Here’s a human point: this little introduction to the following interview with Andrew Bujalski on the occasion of the Sundance and Berlin premieres of his extraordinary new film,...
View ArticleOne-Man Band: A Conversation with Matt Johnson About The Dirties
By Calum Marsh “This movie’s gonna be so good,” raves a zealous teenaged filmmaker to two young kids at the beginning of The Dirties. “It’s set in the club from Irreversible [2002].” The children are...
View ArticleSex, Death, and Geometry: A Conversation Between Alain Guiraudie and João...
João Pedro Rodrigues: I’ve watched L’inconnu du lac twice, and now realize that the film takes place over ten days. Alain Guiraudie: Yes, you’re right. Rodrigues: Only on the ninth day do you omit the...
View ArticleThe Beauty of Horror and the Horror of Beauty: An Encounter with Albert Serra
By Mark Peranson “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”—Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964)...
View ArticleShine a Light: Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
By Michael Sicinski With its very title, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a film that announces itself as being in league with forces not entirely of this world. Nevertheless, its makers are two of...
View ArticleNo Sanctuary: Claire Denis on Bastards
By José Teodoro The first image of Bastards, a gauzy curtain of nocturnal drizzle, falls on us like a heavy dream—or rather, it drags us under. The rain raineth on a whole lot of eerily beautiful gloom...
View ArticleArchitecture of Desire: Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition
By Paul Dallas Le Corbusier’s famous assertion that a house must be “a machine for living” acquires new force in Exhibition, an exquisitely crafted and thrillingly ambiguous chamber drama by the...
View ArticleTime and Space: Moments with Lois Patiño
By Aaron Cutler “Upon entering men in landscape and landscape in men the eternal life of Galicia was created,” reads a quote by famed Galician nationalist Alfonso Daniel Rodriguéz Castelão at the start...
View ArticleWords Matter: James Gray on The Immigrant
By Adam Nayman I won’t write too much about The Immigrant here, as Adam Cook has already ably reviewed the film (in Cinema Scope 55) and because for once, James Gray doesn’t seem to lack for champions...
View ArticleDiary of a Mad Housewife: Robert Greene’s Actress
By Adam Nayman “I tend to break things,” says Brandy Burre early on in Actress, and Robert Greene’s film gives her plenty of opportunities to validate this claim. An aggressively stylized profile of a...
View ArticleDeclarations of Independence: A Conversation Between Alex Ross Perry and Joel...
I first encountered Joel Potrykus’ Ape (2012) when I was a jury member for the Filmmakers of the Present competition at Locarno. As it was the sole American narrative film in the selection, my...
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