Tag: film
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…
Terms and Conditions May Apply
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…
Luchino Visconti: The German Trilogy
Movies have been called the art form of the twentieth century so often that it has become tiresome to refute the claim. Especially since this most degenerate of hybrids meshes the worst of all worlds into predictable pastiches of sentimental melodrama geared toward the mummification of the world’s weakest minds. Despite the occasional outburst of…