“When Le-hun sobs in the artificial rain, back pressed to a plywood facade, the plainness of the wood’s grain brings the audience closer to the material rather than adding distance: the production and the resulting film seem one in the same, part of an enthusiastic defiance of mass-market cinema in favor of local storytelling.” Continue reading Exposed Plywood: Lin Tuan-chiu’s ‘The Husband’s Secret’ (1960)
Ruairí McCann looks back at two distinctly American titles from this year’s Berlinale, one new and one old. Continue reading “Are You Waving The Flag At Me?”—Sly and Prurient Americans at the Berlinale
Happy International Women’s Day! Continue reading International Women’s Day 2022
Strange World (2018) is a short experimental film and photographic series by artist Wen-Han Chang that merges color, light, and ambient sound at a frenetic pace. Continue reading The Strangely Familiar in Wen-Han Chang’s ‘Strange World’
by Ruairí McCann One of the most iconic images of early cinema, from Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), depicts a cylindrical rocket ship lodged in the eye of a personified moon. From this cast-iron splinter flows a gaggle of scientists with wizard-like abilities and appearances. Once they have bored their way through the great stony grimace, they find not a dead rock … Continue reading Review: ‘To The Moon’ (2020), dir. Tadhg O’Sullivan
Women in Revolt is the kind of glorious filth they just don’t — or is it can’t? — make any more. Continue reading ‘Women in Revolt’
There’s no standard criterion for deducing the major/minor status of any given Hong Sang-soo film, which occur at such a steady clip that even the usual associative buzzwords––prolific, generous, obsessive, redundant even––fail at even their most basic purpose. Continue reading Major Minor Love—On Hong Sang-soo’s ‘Introduction’ and ‘In Front of Your Face’
by Ruairí McCann The Shakedown (1929) has just found its way to a Blu-ray release, via Eureka’s Masters of Cinema line and the boxset Early Universal Vol.1, where it’s presented in its silent version with a lively jazz score by Michael Gatt. This finely forged and unabashedly felt movie is no small example of the late silent era on its plinth, when it comes to … Continue reading Blu Review: ‘The Shakedown’ (Early Universal Vol. 1, Eureka)
by Jack Seibert How many French critics does it take to release an American movie? Somewhere in the dozens, if the movie is Robert Kramer’s The Edge. Cahiers du Cinéma spilled gallons of ink around its 1968 release, with Jacques Rivette naming it his favorite film of the year. Three years later he’d transport its paranoid post-revolutionary ramblings across the Atlantic for his legendary Out … Continue reading Rice Krispies for a Revolution – Blu Review: ‘The Edge/Ice’ by Robert Kramer (Re:Voir Video)
by Tomáš Hudák In her latest short film Manifesto, awarded the Dutch critics’ KNF Award at IFF Rotterdam, artist and filmmaker Ane Hjort Guttu examines the institution of university, power relations, and the idea of utopia. Stylized as a documentary, the film focuses on a Norwegian art school that has recently been integrated into a larger university. With staff and students struggling to keep the … Continue reading Communing in a Corporatized University: ‘Manifesto’ (2020) by Ane Hjort Guttu
ULTRA DOGME 