A recent four film Mubi season has served as an introduction to the work of Portuguese director Rita Azevedo Gomes: and if my current feelings are any indication, this is something I’m to be grateful for for a long time to come. The quartet comprises Fragile as the World, about two young lovers who flee […]
MUBI: —A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, 1996) —A Woman’s Revenge (Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2012) —The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986) —Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) —Apiyemiekî? (Ana Vaz, 2020) BFI PLAYER: —Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) —Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2015) —The Chambermaid (Lila Avilés, 2018) —Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) —Theorem (Pier […]
Personal Problems (Bill Gunn, 1980) A Woman’s Revenge (Ritz Azevedo Gomes, 2012) Alexandria, Again and Forever (Youssef Chahine, 1990) The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955) Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010) A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, 1996)
The musical is perfect for yearning. Usually it’s for love: for someone to desire and be desired by. It could be for happiness in a more general sense. And sometimes it’s more specific still. And since the Hollywood musical depends on and is so much about stardom, it makes sense for the films to be […]
Tantalisingly, in an interview with director Lucrecia Martel, writer José Teodoro speaks of the potential to trace a line that goes straight from Zama to La Ciénaga, an unbroken line of people who, despite hundreds of years of geography, refuse to think of themselves as americanos. They want to think of themselves as Europeans enduring some protracted exile. […]
Instead of twenty capsules alongside recommendations, from now on I’ll just provide a list of titles. That way I’ll have more time to write fuller capsules elsewhere on here and link to them if need be. Also, I’ll include both July and August in this edition because these would make so much more sense coming […]
La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000) Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999) Tailpiece (Margaret Tait, 1976) Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955) Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008) Alexandria…Why? (Youssef Chahine, 1979) The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, 2004) Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973) Faithless (Liv Ullmann, 2000)
Scan a representative sample of the writing about Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers’s co-directed feature, Krabi, 2562, and two things are likely to be found: variants of the word “slip” and offshoots of the word “shift.” “Slip” is particularly good in two senses: first, it suggests a lack of friction, that the surfaces of the […]
Beach Rats opens with a montage central to the film’s discourse about desire, in this case a desire partially exposed, partially in shadow. The resulting images will be familiar to anyone who was growing up on Facebook between 2009-2012: a guy’s reflection in a mirror, a selfie of the top off and flash on variety. […]
Here are two things I know to be true: there aren’t enough documentaries about books; when one can be found, it’s almost always disappointing. Well, sigh. D.W. Young’s film, about New York’s rare book dealer and collector scene, promises to be a quaint, easy-going glance in at the lives of those who have made collecting […]
