Berlinale 2018: ‘Season of the Devil’ by Lav Diaz

At last month’s Berlinale I managed to sit down with a pair of compelling filmmakers for a bit of conersation: Lav Diaz and James Benning. Though the Benning piece still needs some time, my thoughts on Diaz’s newest film, Season of the Devil, are now online over at Photogenie. “Lav Diaz’s latest opens on a paramilitary site, freshly bunkered down and established as local headquarters in … Continue reading Berlinale 2018: ‘Season of the Devil’ by Lav Diaz

(Reminiscences of a) Journey to Lithuania: Vilnius Film Festival 2017

Though it’s now been three months since I visited, the Vilnius Film Festival left a greater impression on me as an experience than most of the actual films.  Its director surely won’t be happy to read such an opening, but I’ll admit it as a matter of honest disclosure: thanks to my window of free time matching Barrage’s runtime almost to a T, I slammed … Continue reading (Reminiscences of a) Journey to Lithuania: Vilnius Film Festival 2017

An Interview with Director Sergei Loznitsa (Austerlitz, 2016)

I’m a visiting ‘special guest’ at the Vilnius Film Festival or Kino Pavasaris (Cinema Spring) as it’s known here, and I’m waiting to meet director (and fellow ‘special guest’) Sergei Loznitsa. Despite yesterday evening’s stormy downpour, which still trickled into the early afternoon, the gloom has now mostly lifted and the sun is shining through the hotel café’s mostly-glass annex. Loznitsa appears, somehow slightly taller than … Continue reading An Interview with Director Sergei Loznitsa (Austerlitz, 2016)

Interview w/ Director Laura Schroeder (Barrage, 2017)

Composed predominantly of stillness with erratic musical outbursts, ‘Barrage’ focuses on a tri-generational rift in feminine identity building, in which each daughter fails to completely understand her own mother. Though ‘actress-of-the-moment’ Isabelle Huppert plays the grand matriarch wielding total control and the final word, her screen time is miniscule against a second act which sees Cathrine and her daughter Alba journey into the woods in … Continue reading Interview w/ Director Laura Schroeder (Barrage, 2017)

Berlinale #4: Interview with Mathieu Denis about ‘Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves’

A three-hour venture about the 2012 Quebec student protests and four fictional characters as they carried their ideas forward in the following years, and featuring an overture and intermission to boot, ‘Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves’ (‘Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau’) is a large work of a stylistic formalism not too … Continue reading Berlinale #4: Interview with Mathieu Denis about ‘Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves’

Berlinale #3: Interview with Julian Radlmaier about his debut feature film ‘Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog’

As the 67th International Berlin Film Festival came to a steady close, I sat down with the (relatively) young German director Julian Radlmaier about his debut feature film ‘Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog’ (‘Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes’) which premiered a few weeks earlier in Rotterdam and which screened in the ‘Perspektive Deutsches Kino’ (Perspective of German Cinema) category in Berlin. It is a film just … Continue reading Berlinale #3: Interview with Julian Radlmaier about his debut feature film ‘Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog’

Interview with Director Ben Wheatley on High-Rise

Before the screening, director Ben Wheatley promised us High-Rise had everything we’d need from a film; “dog-eating, ultra-violence, and lots of fucking.” These disparate elements were certainly present, but not quite as fiercely as promised. It’s true that dog-eating occurred within the first five minutes, and the film’s official poster clearly takes some inspiration from the film that invented ultra-violence, but it is kept from … Continue reading Interview with Director Ben Wheatley on High-Rise