Features
A mysterious fascination keeps one watching as On Cinema chugs along, playing out like a never-ending purgatory of what in most universes would have been a short curiosity sketch.
Its creative interactivity distinguishes TikTok from image-based social networks like Instagram, and also explains its dominance as a short-form video app, a larger trend in China.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Ghost Story of Yotsuya, Lord Shango, Malignant, Dracula, Carnival of Souls, Silent Night Deadly Night 3, When a Stranger Calls
The crime remains so notorious in the town that, at one point, a longtime neighbor who resides by the now-shuttered family grocery refuses to discuss it with the director or even appear on camera.
Several films on view continued to reckon, indirectly or otherwise, and to varying degrees of success, with our era of disrupted intimacy and heightened loneliness. Titles include Quickening, The Humans, and The Power of the Dog.
The TIFF Wavelengths program remains an essential overview of the goings-on in contemporary experimental cinema. Titles include Polycephaly in D, Dear Chantal, Inner Outer Space, The Capacity for Adequate Anger, and more.
Ulman has described herself as an artist “based in airports”: functional travel hubs with a navigable universality, regardless of their actual location.
Faulkner evokes our uncomfortable relationship to the fascism that sits at the core of many games, a Pavlovian dopamine rush meant to mimic the very actions that imperialist militaries use to oppress, control, and murder in the name of jingoistic glory, and subversively offers an alternative path of interaction.
As a 2016 film about the 1950s studio system, Hail, Caesar! reminds us that Hollywood has always been a place of myth and self-congratulation, a dream factory that feigns progressiveness while serving national and hegemonic interests.
"As humans, we always want the fireworks. We want the show. But actually a volcano is always erupting. And, as is also true about cinema, the more you learn about the language of a director, the more you can appreciate the idiosyncrasies or the details."
Color is dulled entirely, and reality, visually and morally, appears black and white. When the world is reduced to such simple terms, all that's left is for you to hover your crosshair over that burning target and pull the trigger.
Unless the viewer is aware of the overall structure and has a stopwatch, no cut will be expected and each will appear devoid of motivation, at least according to the conventions that govern editing in Hollywood, art-house, and even many avant-garde films.
Through decades of a certain kind of documentary storytelling and news reporting, audiences are so used to seeing images of poverty and abjection that the even the smallest act of affection comes across as extraordinary and radical.
It is clear that, for some, certain forms are still anathema to what constitutes serious cinema, and that changes in approach, personnel, or temperament are acceptable so long as they do not disrupt our preconceived notions of the author’s vision.