Godard’s ode to the history of cinema, an eight-part ciné-essay demonstrating all cinematic forms seen throughout history, locates within cinema a constantly evolving consciousness. His stream of consciousness filmmaking, which often takes form as multiple simultaneous streams, display a generative quality of film as …
Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema is not only the cinema of class-afforded ennui, of works that see languor as a byproduct of privilege, an offshoot of life stripped of its most innate anxieties, but also the cinema of time, of its erosive effects on memory and other such mental constructs, which, gossamer in nature ….
Based on journalist Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 essay, Emptying the Skies is a harrowing account of the decimation of migratory songbirds in the Mediterranean. Millions of birds are killed every year and many species are at risk of extinction. Though as recently as the last century, they were an important part of the …
An uneasy weave of drama and thriller, Before I Go To Sleep follows a very Memento-esque journey of one amnesiac’s attempts to piece together information about their traumatic past. The hook here is that the amnesiac is a housewife and, similar to Memento, the new memories she makes in her sleuthing don’t last very …
I’ve never been able to get into skiing. Despite growing up in the tundra known as Upstate New York, having more than a passing familiarity with a white landscape, and constantly being barraged by accusatory exclamations of “you don’t ski,” I just haven’t taken to those vehicles of death. There is…
Equally a caustic encapsulation of celebrity culture and a confessional of one’s more-cultivating-than-complicit role in it, Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita is the work of an artist at odds not with the professional system in which he works but with the state of cultural decline that certain parasitic vocations – his lead and …
It’s 1988, and beautiful housewife Eve Connor (Eva Green) has disappeared, leaving her distraught husband Brock (Christopher Meloni) and curiously unconcerned 17-year-old daughter Kat (Shailene Woodley) behind. More interested in fine-tuning her angst and sleeping with her hunky-but-stupid boyfriend than her mother’s …
Goodbye to Language is a crazy quilt of the obsessions of Jean-Luc Godard. War imagery collides with domestic hostility collides with footage of the filmmaker’s dog. The scenes change like channels on some spastic, possessed television. For many, the film may play like unwatchable chaos – all noise and no signal. Getting on its wavelength requires a certain level of masochism. You…
Tales of adolescent delinquency and alienation have been a well-trodden path before to put it mildly, so Asia Argento’s Incompresa isn’t exactly venturing into new territory with its premise. What it lacks for in immediate originality though, it makes up for it largely by conjuring up its own unique charm and then using it …
Jarring fragments from a new realm of creative possibilities flood the screen with mid 1990s CRT technological aesthetics. Motion and light existing solely in a fabricated vacuum circumnavigates the world at lightning speeds as material objects have been given a new method of intercommunication that requires waning levels of …