Rarely have words the heft of László Krasznahorkai’s: the Hungarian author, whose dystopian tomes manifest in technique and tone the terrifying banality with which we crawl toward death, doesn’t so much tell stories as intone them, the incessant trudge of his behemoth sentences rendering the …
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 ….
At one point in Diao Yinan’s third feature film, the camera presents the point of view of a car that is reaching the end of a tunnel. The year is 1999. A thick snow covers the road. To the right of the lane are a parked motorcycle and a man slumped on a block of cement. The camera with the car’s point of view passes him by.
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 …
Stanley Kubrick had a reputation for making what was said to be cold, distant films. He kept everyone at arm’s length while he told stories that were predominantly about the dehumanization of society and under most circumstances generally horrible people. This assertion seems dismissive and is natural if the viewer …
So says George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Decline of the English Murder”, a text invoked by IndieCork programmer Mick Hannigan as he introduced Christopher Presswell’s Candlestick, a film very much intent on constituting a resurrection. Not so much…
Sometimes life hits you with a bunch of complicated shit when all you really want to do is spin a Neil Young record and roll another number. Inherent Vice is a film about that feeling. It’s about other things, too: capitalism, counterculture, California. It’s also about how much Paul Thomas Anderson, the film’s director …
A selection of writings from around the internet on the topics of Joan Rivers’ later work as a detraction from her trailblazing start, maintaining the mystery in The Leftovers, the Chinese Government’s decimation of the Beijing Independent Film Festival, and why reality TV shows need to stop casting crazy people.
The sophisticated script of Gosford Park (2001) involves more than two dozen characters, each given the respect and screen-time deserving of a lead. Altman presents the viewer with a myriad of expressions, interactions, and gesticulations, many of which increase in significance retroactively. One disregards the initial …
The Graduate 2, starring Julie Roberts as the daughter of Ben and Elaine. This silly concept is pitched in the opening of Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player. Like the rest of the film, it’s humorously silly but scarily accurate to the Hollywood of the 1990s and today. Right from the get-go, one can see classic notions of Hollywood …