Memoria arrives amidst a flurry of activity for the 51-year-old Thai filmmaker. In addition to the feature and the book, there’s Night Colonies, his contribution to the omnibus project The Year of the Everlasting Storm (which also premiered at Cannes); a solo exhibition of his video and installation work at the IAC Villeurbanne; and a career-spanning retrospective at FIDMarseille, where the director was on hand just days after Cannes to receive the festival’s Grand Prix d’Honneur.

By Jordan Cronk Published in Cinema Scope #88 (Fall 2021) “When he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories…Now his perception and his memory were infallible.”—Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” Amongst the research materials, set photographs, email correspondence, and treatment excerpts…

By Kong Rithdee Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Midway into Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira Pongpas visits the Shrine of the Two Goddesses with her American husband to make offerings: she gives the goddesses a cheetah figurine for blessings on her bad leg, a gibbon for her strong limbs, and a tiger for…

By Kong Rithdee Midway into Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira Pongpas visits the Shrine of the Two Goddesses with her American husband to make offerings: she gives the goddesses a cheetah figurine for blessings on her bad leg, a gibbon for her strong limbs, and a tiger for the strength of her new son, Itt, one…

By Chuck Stephens Apichatpong Weerasethakul may be on a first0name basis with more people on the planet than any other Cannes-prizewinning filmmaker in history, but no matter how “average” Joe—or Joei, as he’s more recently taken to transliterating his nickname—might seem to become, he never begins to lose his heavenly glow, his beatific gleam. When…

Few contemporary artists feel as attuned to late capitalism—and its insidious means of extracting both our time and resources—as Saenjaroen, whose works offer means of escape from or refutation of these forces.

By Robert Koehler Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the…

Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the filmmaking takes place in a communist-governed nation like Vietnam, where capital operates (albeit sometimes uneasily) within a state-run system.

we don’t see anyone die in The Maiden, a ghost story wherein the dead are less gone than misplaced (even a lifeless cat appears to survive the cosmic wash cycle). While one may occasionally take issue with the film’s determinedly elliptical approach to its central subject, Foy always remains both formally and narratively fastened to the amorphous, ugly, and insoluble reality of grief.

Every single one of the films listed in this year’s top ten premiered at a film festival in 2021, in particular, either Berlin (four), Cannes (both six in Official Selection and two in Quinzaine), or Venice (two). And not only did all the films premiere at festivals, but every single one of them also had a theatrical release in North America (or, in the case of Hong Sangsoo and a few others, will have one in 2022; as typical of recent years, 12 months cannot conceivably contain the Hong output for said year). 

Interviews I Remember Everything: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria by Jordan Cronk Do the Hustle: Sean Baker on Red Rocket by Blake Williams Cartooning Unlimited: Dash Shaw on Cryptozoo and Discipline by Sean Rogers Features To Sir, with Love: Maria Speth’s Mr. Bachmann and His Class by Michael Sicinski Next Stop Eternity Peter Tscherkassky’s Train Again and…

After a year’s hiatus from the Croisette, we’re back with our first ever fall issue devoted to Cannes, which took place in July in the middle of a pandemic, in case you forgot. Because it was summer and travel was permitted, I followed the many, many movies I saw at Cannes with a relaxing vacation on a COVID-free, beach-heavy island, where the only film I watched was, appropriately, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old.

And so goes the decade, and perhaps all of humanity as we know it—it was fun while it lasted. As a supplement to the Top Ten lists published here, which semi-scientifically summarize the privately expressed preferences of our regular contributors, I decided to do something a little different to glance back at the past ten years. By the time of publication you can find numerous examples of excellent writing on all of the films in our decade-end list, both in previous issues of Cinema Scope and also in other publications, in print and online, on the occasion of revisiting the past ten bountiful years in cinema.

Although there have always been intrepid critics and cinephiles who have engaged with films belonging to the non-narrative avant-garde, there has existed a perception that such films, operating as they do on somewhat different aesthetic precepts, could be considered a separate cinematic realm, one that even the most dutiful critic could engage with or not, as he or she saw fit.

By Jennifer Lynde Barker Manta Ray is a film about the Other and all that this philosophical, social, and ethical concept implies. The film strikes a graceful balance between the details of lived experience and a deeper symbolic scope, building the story quietly towards an encounter with the irreducible reality of Others and our responsibility…

By Blake Williams Published in Cinema Scope 75 (Summer 2018)   “If the cinema isn’t made to express dreams or everything that in waking life has something in common with dreams, then it has no point.”—Antonin Artaud, “Sorcellerie et cinéma” (ca. 1928) Cinema, however realist it may ever strive to be, is synonymous with dreaming.…

By Blake Williams “If the cinema isn’t made to express dreams or everything that in waking life has something in common with dreams, then it has no point.”—Antonin Artaud, “Sorcellerie et cinéma” (ca. 1928) Cinema, however realist it may ever strive to be, is synonymous with dreaming. Fundamentally past-tense, after the fact; industrially and institutionally…

By Robert Koehler In Park City this January, all of those attending the Sundance Film Festival were told in no uncertain terms on a daily, if not hourly, basis that “the story lives in you.” The statement was right there on the cover of the catalogue, so dominant that it replaced the words—“Sundance Film Festival”—that…

By Blake Williams “[Cinemas of the senses] generate worlds of mutating sounds and images that often ebb and flow between the figurative and the abstract, and where the human form, at least as a unified entity, easily loses its function as the main point of reference. One way or another, the cinema of sensation is…

By Michael Sicinski The Seen and Unseen is a truly singular film, but it does not relinquish its secrets easily. The story of two young twins, the girl Tantri (Ni Kadek Thaly Titi Kasih) and the boy Tantra (Ida Bagus Putu Radithya Mahijasena), who share an intense emotional bond that may extend beyond death, The…

By Blake Williams Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) “[Cinemas of the senses] generate worlds of mutating sounds and images that often ebb and   flow between the figurative and the abstract, and where the human form, at least as a unified entity, easily loses its function as the main point of reference. One way…

By Mark Peranson To celebrate its 70th anniversary, Cannes aggressively, yet clumsily, inserted itself into all kinds of contemporary debates over that age-old question: What is Cinema? The first answer to this question: the cinema is Cannes. On the organizational side, this was evident in the reworking of the festival trailer that runs prior to…

All TIFF 2014 TIFF 2015 TIFF 2016 TIFF 2017 TIFF 2018 TIFF 2019 TIFF 2020 TIFF 2021 TIFF 2021 | The Other Tom (Rodrigo Plá, Laura Santullo, Mexico/USA) By Angelo Muredda Single mom Elena (Julia Chavez) tries to do right by her scampish ten-year-old son Tom (Israel Rodríguez Bertorelli) despite the interventions of the byzantine…

By Mark Peranson Well, at least the weather was good. Every year another leak threatens to spring in the dam, but the Festival de Cannes is not going to die a death of a thousand, or even a million, cracks. I started to vomit up the Kool-Aid at least a decade ago, and harbour no…

  By Andréa Picard “We dreamed of utopia and we woke up screaming.”—Roberto Bolaño, First Infrarealist Manifesto Last year, Vogue Paris published an issue devoted to the “avant-garde,” seemingly another instance of mainstream popular culture co-opting the language and ethos of radical art and politics. At a certain juncture, this would not have seemed so…

By Jason Anderson Simone Rapisarda Casanova says that there is a Borges story so deeply embedded in his brain that only a lobotomy could remove it. Such a surgery would be suitably Borgesian in and of itself, but he should be safe from it in the meantime. The story, he explains, is “The Aleph,” a…

By Blake Williams The title of Tsai Ming-liang’s tenth feature Stray Dogs bears a fairly conspicuous resemblance to a key metaphor from Laozi’s 6th-century Chinese philosophical text Tao Te Ching, which allegorizes man’s relationship with the heavens as that of a straw dog and the one who created it. Literally a dog-shaped figure made out…

By Jason Anderson Though feelings of fear and pain are palpable in almost every moment of The Oxbow Cure, a curious sense of exhilaration cuts through the frigid dead. Maybe that’s due to the co-directors’ Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas’ possible realization that they’ve managed to do something uncommonly brave within a Canadian system that…

By Kong Rithdee Handcuffed to Ryan Gosling in the nightmare that is my home city, let me walk you through the checklist. Elephant: Yes.  Eastern mysticism: Yes. Muay Thai: Yes. Monks or monk-like figures: Yes. Nocturnal Bangkok in the claws of neon light, in a lesser-Lynch lurid trance: Yes. Flummoxed foreigners lost in a labyrinth:…

By Boris Nelepo “I love to watch the stars. It’s one of those simple things that give me at least a remote idea of infinity along with some great poetry,” the ghost philosopher says in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s À l’aventure (2008), and Brisseau shares with his characters that same longing for the ineffable, as well as…

Phil Coldiron I was planning on starting this little capsule by noting how I had never seen anything by Kim Ki-duk prior to this viewing. Turns out, I still haven’t; and given that, this obviously isn’t a review, or even really about Pieta at all. If you’re wondering, based on the thirty-some minutes that I…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Burru’s Abominable Dialectic: Nicolas Rey’s autrement, la Molussie (France)—Wavelengths By Michael Sicinski In composing this essay on Nicolas Rey’s latest film, I have opted to follow a principle similar to the one that gives his film its overall shape. The essay consists of six semi-autonomous sections, which I have assigned an…

Editor’s Note Back to business as usual, which means being crabby about Cannes and printing long articles about filmmakers nobody has heard of. We’ll get to Cannes later on, with pieces dispersed throughout Issue 51 and also resting in the typical centre-square spotlight. For now I would rather devote my allotted space to some observations…

By Michael Sicinski Twelve years on, the Jeonju International Film Festival’s Digital Project is only getting stronger. This unique endeavour, whose history and raison d’être has been amply chronicled elsewhere (notably by James Bell in Sight & Sound,), remains impossible to pin down. While the JDP has generally remained focused on Asian directors, the project…

This is the complete list of articles from Cinema Scope issue 50. * Articles available online Features and Interviews *Film Criticism After Film Criticism: The J. Hoberman Affair by Mark Peranson *The Animal Equation by Denis Côté small roads, 103 minutes, 47 shots, 2011 by James Benning *Epinephrine, Man: The Cranked-Up Films of Neveldine/Taylor by…

By Mark Peranson In a subconscious sense, the impassioned cris de coeur that rippled through the internet following the shocking, but not surprising, dismissal of J. Hoberman from his position as senior film critic for the Village Voice on January 4, 2012, are evidence of an anxiety that springs from the changing nature of the…

By Bart Testa The Toronto International Film Festival’s experimental film series Wavelengths was begun by Cinematheque Ontario programmer Susan Oxtoby a decade ago as an outgrowth of her popular year-round Cinematheque series The Free Screen—and not of anything happening at TIFF itself, which has consistently displayed little interest in avant-garde films. Wavelengths continued with Oxtoby’s…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum If there’s any overarching lesson I learned from teaching film history to undergraduates over the past year in Richmond, Virginia (which, logistically speaking, is what obliged me to suspend this column for half a year), it’s that they know both less and more about history and film history than I did as…

1. Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000) 2. In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, 2001) 3. La libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001) 4. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003) 5. 13 Lakes (James Benning, 2004) 6. Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz, 2004) 7. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000) 8. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006) 9. Memories…

Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Postman’s White Nights, Peter Strickland on The Duke of Burgundy and more...