Author Adam Kuntavanish

Cinema transcends boundaries of time and space and thought and emotion; at its best it communicates the experience of being truly alive. I've been transfixed by the material ghosts of the movies since an early age, and I can't seem to shake them. Since reading and writing and talking about films are the next best things to watching them, criticism became a natural fit. Whether new or old, foreign or domestic, mainstream or cult, all movies are grist for my mill. Be forewarned, I'm an inveterate list-maker, so look out for rankings, topics, and opinions of all kinds. The AFI's got nothing on me.

Top Ten
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As a follow-up to my list of this topic i 2011, I’m taking stock of the world of acting in the past year in cinema. Nearly every awards body gives out acting awards, but only a handful recognize a Best Cast or Best Ensemble of the year, as distinct from a more all-encompassing Best Picture. Two notable films from the year, Gravity and All is Lost, capitalize on their dual or solo protagonist(s) as the only characters, but nearly every other example relies on the interplay between recognizable stars, character actors, newbies, and extras. Effective ensembles of 2013 came under directors known for orchestrating, even indulging, an unwieldy stable of actors (David O. Russell, Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Woody Allen), as well as filmmakers more known for focused tone in both acting and visuals (Steve McQueen, Denis Villeneuve, Sofia Coppola). The year was also notable for some relatively sensitive coming-of-age films involving large casts of young people and fun entries in ensemble-heavy franchises like Fast & Furious and The Hobbit. Next week I will unveil my own choices, but until then please comment on your own favorites.

Top Ten
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As a follow-up to my list of this topic in 2011, I’m taking stock of the world of acting in the past year of cinema. Nearly every awards body gives out acting awards, but only a handful recognize a Best Cast or Best Ensemble of the year, as distinct from a more all-encompassing Best Picture. Two notable films from the year, Gravity and All is Lost, capitalize on their dual or solo protagonist(s) as the only characters, but nearly every other example relies on the interplay between recognizable stars, character actors, newbies, and extras. Effective ensembles of 2013 came under directors known for orchestrating, even indulging, an unwieldy stable of actors (David O. Russell, Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Woody Allen), as well as filmmakers more known for focused tone in both acting and visuals (Steve McQueen, Denis Villeneuve, Sofia Coppola). The year was also notable for some relatively sensitive coming-of-age films involving large casts of young people and fun entries in ensemble-heavy franchises like Fast & Furious and The Hobbit. Next week I will unveil my own choices, but until then please comment on your own favorites.

Reviews threematch-1
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The phrase “three on a match” refers to a wartime superstition in which the glow of a match lit long enough for three soldiers would alert the enemy and spell doom for one of the trio; the film Three on a Match introduces then playfully undercuts such hokum, explaining that match manufacturer Ivar Keuger invented and exploited the belief to sell more matches. Such juggling of tones, shifting from melodrama to lightheartedness and back again, exemplifies director Mervyn LeRoy’s and writer Lucien Hubbard’s breakneck tale of three schoolgirl friends (played in childhood by Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, and Virginia Davis) who take very different paths to adulthood and finally reunite by chance in the then-contemporary New York of 1932.

Editor's Pick shiningdeadzone
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As part of our coverage of TIFF’s From Within - The Films of David Cronenberg series, this is a video essay comparing and contrasting Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, two adaptations of Stephen King. I was inspired by Next Projection’s own Luke Annand’s essay “Comparative Examination: The Shining and The Dead Zone” and Drew Morton’s video essay “Free Will in Kubrick’s The Shining.” A transcript of my voice-over narration is printed below.

Reviews -1
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H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories of the 1920s and 1930s have exerted a widespread influence over the genre in all forms of media, but the best-known film adaptations of his work are associated with writer Dennis Paoli, producers Charles and Albert Band and Brian Yuzna, and writer-director Stuart Gordon. Following the success of their gory and witty Lovecraft update Re-Animator, much of the same cast and crew embarked upon a perhaps even more ambitious follow-up. Its complete title is H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond, but like its predecessor, it greatly expounds upon the original tale in order to honor the spirit of Lovecraft’s malignant cosmology that hides just outside human comprehension; where the author used hints and suggestion in prose, the filmmakers try to show what Lovecraft considered unshowable.

Top Ten blacknarcissus1
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The advent and eventual dominance of color cinema around the world brought with them aesthetic challenges as well as rewards. While superficially bringing movies closer to “realism,” the use of color, like the use of sound, can also go beyond merely reflecting what’s in front of the camera and be adjusted for stylistic effect, from washing out into gritty dullness to amplifying into garish expressionism and every mode in between. Color cinematography has so become the go-to paradigm that many films don’t even consider strategies of light, shadow, and color in telling their stories; yet the great movies since the dawn of color make expert use of everything at their visual disposal. The power of color can come from the artistry and craftsmanship of many individuals: the production designer, the art director, the cinematographer, the costume designer, and of course the overall director orchestrating these elements into, ideally, a coherent whole. This list topic is the use of color in movies, highlighting my favorite color films of all time.

Top Ten
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The advent and eventual dominance of color cinema around the world brought with them aesthetic challenges as well as rewards. While superficially bringing movies closer to “realism,” the use of color, like the use of sound, can also go beyond merely reflecting what’s in front of the camera and be adjusted for stylistic effect, from washing out into gritty dullness to amplifying into garish expressionism and every mode in between. Color cinematography has so become the go-to paradigm that many films don’t even consider strategies of light, shadow, and color in telling their stories; yet the great movies since the dawn of color make expert use of everything at their visual disposal. The power of color can come from the artistry and craftsmanship of many individuals: the production designer, the art director, the cinematographer, the costume designer, and of course the overall director orchestrating these elements into, ideally, a coherent whole. This list topic for the next Top Ten Tuesday is the use of color in movies, highlighting my favorite color films of all time, and I invite readers to submit their own lists and discuss in the comments below.

Top Ten woody-allen-1
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Besides forcing me to catch up on my Woody blind spots and revisiting old, familiar favorites, editing the above video afforded me some insights on the intelligent casting and wide-ranging performance styles on display in the films of Woody Allen. The early movies took on the digressive shapes of stand-up comedy and sketch-writing, two worlds from which Allen transitioned into movies in the 1960s, and how a given performer could prevail within such short-form spaces would dictate their success (see one of my choices, Gene Wilder in the hit-or-miss Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask), or Jerry Lacy as a spectral Bogart in the Allen-penned Play It Again, Sam). With Sleeper in 1973, Allen had a comedy partner/love interest in Diane Keaton who could both parry and augment his own peculiar mix of sarcastic intellectualism and unconventional sex appeal. Though I adore her in that film and in Love and Death, as she brings a thoroughly contemporary sensibility to the future and czarist Russia, respectively, their collaboration reaches its peak with his most critically-acclaimed film, Annie Hall, where she embodies a character not just as a sounding board to Allen’s neuroses but with a recognizable style and sturdy inner life of her own. Although his most structurally-sound and conventional romantic comedy to date, Annie Hall was still recognizably the product of a comedian’s worldview, so Interiors looked at the time like a bolt from the blue, despite the heavy Russian literary overtones of Love and Death and other highbrow references sprinkled in the previous movies. The film’s chilled, bloodless mise-en-scène has aged well, but on my most recent viewing for this project, Maureen Stapleton‘s breezy, gregarious demeanor and bright red costume shock Interiors with a welcome burst of life.

Top Ten blue-jasmine-1
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It’s a good bet that every actor and actress wants to become a part of the ever-sprawling stable of Woody Allen, the actor-writer-director of nearly a movie a year since 1966. In a career of forty-four films over forty-seven years and counting, Allen has directed six performances to Academy Awards and ten more to nominations. From early farcical comedies like Bananas to still funny but fundamentally more serious comedy-dramas about relationships such as Hannah and Her Sisters, from pastiches of his beloved idol Bergman (Another Woman) to Fellini (Stardust Memories), from a fallow period in the early 2000s (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion) to later resurgence in popularity (Midnight in Paris), one constant has been Allen’s facility with ensembles and both men and women working on a wide range of registers, even if under his own direction he’s always distinctly himself. He’s notably directed his own lovers Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, as well as various seemingly thinly-veiled chatty and neurotic Woody stand-ins, and women especially have gained acclaim in his films (eleven of the sixteen total acting Oscar nominations were to actresses). In recognition of the good notices for the newest Allen film, Blue Jasmine, and its star, Cate Blanchett, the upcoming Top Ten Tuesday is celebrating my own favorite performances from across his entire career, from comedy to drama to everywhere in between. Leave a comment below listing your own choices.

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