Tag: cinema
Remembering Robocop: The smouldering dystopian wreck of 80s avarice
There has never been, so far as I can recall, a period in my life during which I have not been obsessed by the cinematic form in some way or other. And while my tastes have continued to evolve or change over time, there have been a handful of films that have travelled with me…
Hallucinations on film: Six startling unrealities in cinema
Some of the most memorable scenes in the cinema have involved hallucinations seen by movie characters, and although one could argue that film itself is an apparition – an imaginary product consumed as popular art – it’s hardly redundant to crow about the best such images on the screen. Here are six of the…
Fugitive visions: Foreign film and the new iconography
One perfect shot does not a bad film fix. I learned this many years ago during a screening of Alek Keshishian’s With Honors (1994), a Sven Nykvist-lensed flick that, if I remember correctly, featured among the generally dreary sequences an incredible, blink-and-it’s-gone image of a church towering behind Brendan Fraser’s character. It didn’t make the movie watchable,…
Love at first shot: When great directors meet their muse
It was the 2010 character study of Greenberg (2010) that brought Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig together. He plucked her from an extensive audition process with only a few New York Mumblecore films to her name. Clearly both on the same artistic wave-length, there’s a definite sense of love in the air between actress and…
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The new millennium has seen a rapid growth in the number of conscientious big-topic documentaries. There have been multiple entries on such inescapable issues as the environment (An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour, Gasland), industrialised agriculture (The Future of Food, King Corn, Food Inc.) and widespread financial chicanery (The Corporation, Inside Job). Now it’s the Internet’s…