Issue 97 contents with all the free articles linked. Includes Interviews, Features, Columns, Film/Art and more.

I feel like I’ve explained enough in this space over the last year, so that announcing this is the final issue of Cinema Scope is in no way surprising. But let me reiterate that the time has long passed to envision a way of making this magazine sustainable financially without begging for money, or sustainable emotionally without driving me to a premature death...

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s sublime eco-fable, Evil Does Not Exist,begins and ends with the plangent score by Ishibashi Eiko, played fortissimo over an extended tracking shot facing skywards. A forest canopy, stark and stripped of its foliage by winter’s spell, appears like latticework through which daylight passes with an eerie vibrancy.

Two movies, both alike in indignity, in the ’90s, where we lay our scene. Because neither Videoheaven nor Pavements—both putatively non-fictional pop-culture essay films written and directed by Alex Ross Perry—have officially been released, programmed at a festival, or even announced via trailers or posters, it’s tricky to write about their intricacies, either as standalone works or in conversation with one another.

Until recently a somewhat forgotten figure of the New Argentine Cinema, director Rodrigo Moreno has, with The Delinquents, asserted himself as perhaps that movement’s most underestimated talent.

As the supervisory board is currently tasked with restructuring the documenta selection process, the fear is that the freedom traditionally granted to the exhibition’s artistic direction will be drastically constrained in order to prevent any new national “scandal” the likes of which occurred around documenta 15 in 2022.

Don Siegel’s superior crime picture Charley Varrick (1973) was supposed to be called Last of the Independents, but that title was nixed by Universal honcho Lew Wasserman. This probably gives even more credence to the subversive, stick-it-to-the-system notion nestled inside this tale of a crop-duster pilot who has resorted to small-scale robbery for a living because he can no longer compete against the capitalist monopoly in his legal job. 

Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dusted off and presented to eager publics. Even a right-wing newspaper like London’s Telegraph had cause last November to speak of a “repertory boom” in the city where I live, deeming it “the year’s most unlikely media trend.” Their idea of what this looks like is a bit different than mine; not everyone is “suddenly” lining up to see Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

It requires relatively little mental strain to imagine a world in which all that can be photographed has been; it requires, I think, considerably more to imagine one in which every possible photograph has been made. I find that both of these little thought experiments imply comic narratives—that is, to borrow a definition, ones which resolve in favour of their protagonists. And who might these protagonists be? 

The directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character in movies and then a subject were outsiders, like Wim Wenders and Billy Wilder, or tourists, like Antonioni. They weren’t interested in what made Los Angeles like a city; they were interested in what made Los Angeles unlike the cities they knew.

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.

To describe a film as being “about memory” is almost as cliché as to say that it is “about time.” Few subjects are thought to be more suited to a temporal medium defined by its mechanical recording apparatus. Yet the films of the late Terence Davies are to my mind the rare works actually deserving of such a description.

While I would never compare the end of a magazine’s run with the end of a person’s life, there is a painful appropriateness to the fact that I am eulogizing my friend, filmmaker Vincent Grenier, in the final issue of Cinema Scope. Grenier’s work represents a tactile, phenomenological cinema that is not very popular with current tastemakers.

Enter Joe Pera, the comedian, actor, director, writer, and producer whose self-financed, self-produced, and self-released comedy special, Joe Pera: Slow & Steady, dropped on his YouTube channel in early October.

In what will likely be my last column in these pages, I’ve mainly tried to highlight releases and films that I’ve been meaning yet failing to watch for ages, following the assumption that it’s now or never. As most of my examples make clear, this avoidance has something to do with the unhealthiness or pessimism these films tend to leak from every pore.

The greatest film ever made that you’ve in all likelihood never seen, Will Hindle’s 1968 short masterwork Chinese Firedrill is a rarely screened, never-digitized chamber piece/psychodrama about memory, consciousness, involution, set design, comic/cosmic performance, and the inscrutable experiments and sublime experiences of photo-chemical cinema as it was just a little over half a century ago.

Clocking in at a clean 47 seconds, the title sequence in The Killer sets something like a metronome for David Fincher’s latest effort.

The extreme thoroughness, subtlety, and thought invested in this project indicate that, as Scorsese moves into his Joe Biden years, he has evolved into a more nuanced, more complex film artist. 

Given the stylistic consistency yet markedly disparate subject matter of his vast oeuvre to date, it is curious to consider what, if anything, constituted the precedent for his latest film, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, a typically protracted look at an historically family-run restaurant near Lyon.

...the premise of Poor Things—both in Alasdair Gray’s novel and the screenplay adapted by Tony McNamara—arrives as a potentially poignant advancement of Frankenstein’s Monster.

The latest film by Martín Rejtman reaffirms his singular place in Argentine and world cinema as one of the rare non-mainstream auteurs working today, with brio and invention, in the realm of comedy.

The aesthetic appeal of Sofia Coppola’s work—baby pink and pastel colours, girly make-up and cute clothes, soft lighting and trippy music—belies a deeper understanding of the condition of teenage girls, her favourite subject. For the filmmaker, these formal elements aren’t just their surface, but their very substance—the Lisbon sisters’ pink bedrooms in The Virgin Suicides (1999) are part and parcel of their identities.