by Ruairí McCann Near the end of Tsai Ming-liang’s film Afternoon (2015) — a conversation, filmed across 134 minutes and 4 shots, between Tsai and his muse Lee […]
Review: ‘Time’ (2020, dir. Garrett Bradley) – London Film Festival
Time (2020) is Garrett Bradley’s second feature and a concept which is explained from manifold points of view and forms of expression.
Review: ‘American Utopia’ (2020, dir. Spike Lee) – London Film Festival
Stop Making Sense (1984) is a cornerstone in the intersection between pop music and cinema; a concert film in which one of the best bands of the fertile crescent that was the post-punk years is at their most ambitious, cohesive and passionate as a live act, captured intelligently by the great Jonathan Demme, also in his prime. In other words, it is a zenith that American Utopia could never be expected to reach.
Within the Divide: Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ (2020) – NYFF
Between 1970 and 1984, the BBC undertook the Play for Today drama anthology project, commissioning more than 300 television plays––most of which were adapted from plays or novels––that would typically run anywhere between 50 to 100 minutes.
Review: ‘Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ (2020, dir. Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV) – LFF
Once John Cassavetes, when talking about the heavy drinking in his film Husbands (1970), compared the camaraderie of being in a bar to that of being in a war.
Review: ‘The Disciple’ (2020) by Chaitanya Tamhane – London Film Festival
Early in writer-director Chaitanye Tamhane’s second feature, The Disciple, the mastery of Hindustani classical music is described as an ‘eternal quest’, which will require ‘sacrifice and no surrender’. Later, its polar opposite is expressed, encouraging practitioners to take a step back and look at what they do within its historical context.
On Bodies: ‘The House Is Black’ and the Politics of Corporeal Representation(s)
In his essay “The Queen of Sheba,”1 Iranian critic Hesam Amiri recounts the reactions that The House Is Black (1963) received from reviewers upon its release. The common thread among all of the predominantly negative reviews was that the film was deemed “too feminine” or (contradicting the prior claim) that it was not actually directed by Forough Farrokhzad, but by her partner, the prominent filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan…
DVD Review: ‘Light Years’ by Gunvor Nelson (Re:Voir video)
by MLP Fog Pumas (1967) opens on the inverted black and white of a negative image of a naked girl, lying in an empty bathtub. The camera then […]
UDVFF 15: A Week with Luis Arnias
“You give me something to think about/I’ll give you something to live without/And you give me something to take the day away.”
TROUT FUN #5 – Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), dir. Sadao Yamanaka
TROUT FUN is a special column in which Ultra Dogme contributors spend time with a film of their choosing, free from virtually any restrictions. Previous TROUT FUN articles […]