Features
Is Putin the cause or the result of Russia’s systemic ills? A tentative answer might be found in the Russian cinema of the 21st century, which, as it happens, coincides with the beginning and ongoing rule of this postmodern tsar.
Two halves form a harmonious whole in Feast of the Epiphany, the new feature from Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert and longtime RS staff writer Farihah Zaman. Feast made its world premiere on June 23 at BAMcinemaFest 2018. More showtimes and more festivals to come.
The super-fan has progressed to secretary, then understudy, then professional and romantic usurper. Six years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All About Eve tapped a rich vein of existential panic tied to the theme of replication and replaceability.
What of art then? Is its thrill ever about aesthetics alone? This question is just one of many raised by Barbara Visser’s smart, approachable, and entertaining documentary The End of Fear.
Gibson shows that filmmaking is an extension of a practice that is already proactive and lived. The evolving relationship between filmmaker and subject is retained implicitly in nearly every shot and interaction.
The Breadwinner is a simple story about a young girl who loves her father, but there are layers that acknowledge the complexities of the political situation in Afghanistan, children growing up in conflict, and the fact there are no easy answers.
Filmmakers are actively pushing up against what it means to make a documentary at all, and the True/False Film Festival caters to and nurtures that objective. I am especially thankful to True/False for exposing me to new possibilities for Black cinema.
As an actor who’s worked a lot with improvised movies, it was always really interesting for me that, especially if you are improvising in a film without much preparation for your character, you are drawing on your own life and then your own life is a thing that ends up in the film, and that is . . . complicated.
Berlin 2018: Loznitsa is an assiduous practitioner of observational cinema. One may even argue that his nonfiction filmmaking is to the study of spaces charged with political memory what Frederick Wiseman is to the exploration of institutions.
A series full of mistaken identities and roving impostors, Twin Peaks: The Return is a heads-up to look for cinema in places other than where it’s alleged to be found.
One of the unexpected pleasures of this Twin Peaks was just how unexpected it was, how it didn’t seem interested in reheating an old dish in the name of “fan service.”
Much of what is dearest in cinema can be credited to brash buccaneers and independent operators working at the periphery, though few are the film artists, like Lynch, who can maintain freedom of the margins.
One of the jobs of the artist is to find the space that is most conducive to the practice of their art at the given moment; one of the jobs of a functioning cultural commentariat is to follow artists to those spaces.
Years in Review
Best Supporting Actress, Best Monologue, Worst Supporting Gay, Most Tonally Strange, Best Age-Inappropriate Romance, Paul Giamatti Award for Overacting, Best Bookends, and much more