Adam Cook

Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea) — Special Presentations

By Adam Cook Published in Cinema Scope #79 (Summer 2019) Precisely a decade after his last film shot and produced in South Korea, Bong Joon Ho returns to a place that feels both familiar and unfamiliar with his Palme d’Or-crowned Parasite. Moving beyond the ambitious, overly conceptual, and uneven international co-productions Snowpiercer and Okja, Parasite…
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Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, South Korea)

Precisely a decade after his last film shot and produced in South Korea, Bong Joon Ho returns to a place that feels both familiar and unfamiliar with his Palme d’Or-crowned Parasite. Moving beyond the ambitious, overly conceptual, and uneven international co-productions Snowpiercer and Okja, Parasite feels like a movie that only could have been made after such an awkward foray into globalized filmmaking.
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Everything Transitory Is But an Image: Andrea Bussmann on Fausto

By Josh Cabrita and Adam Cook “Most people want to be kings and queens, but not enough want to be Faust.” —Jean-Luc Godard, Le livre d’image When Goethe wrote his Faust, adapting the German legend about a scholar who makes a pact with the Devil to attain total knowledge, could he have foreseen how incisive…
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Fake Empire: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street

By Adam Cook Based on the memoirs of ’90s stock swindler Jordan Belfort—whose investment firm cum criminal enterprise Stratton Oakmont made him a multi-millionaire by the age of 26, and resulted in investor losses of over $200 million by the time he was sent to prison for fraud and money laundering in 1998—Martin Scorsese’s The…
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TIFF 2013 | The King’s Body (João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal)—Wavelengths

By Adam Cook The King’s Body is at least the third film this year to play with a formula in which the filmmaker(s) provide an environment and scenario and introduce to it a variable (people, actors), the ensuing interaction between the controlled and uncontrolled becoming the source of the film’s meaning; the two others I…
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TIFF 2013: Mary, Queen of Scots (Thomas Imbach, Switzerland/France)

By Adam Cook Thomas Imabch’s Mary, Queen of Scots seemingly has a lot going for it: rising actress Camille Rutherford, who gave a memorable lead performance in Nicolas Klotz’s Low Life two years ago; a solid supporting cast (Mehdi Dehbi as Rizzio, in particular, steals the show); a wintery mise en scène that de-romanticizes the…
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Forced Exchange: Nicolás Pereda and Jacob Schulsinger on Killing Strangers

By Adam Cook Now in its fourth year, DOX:LAB is an initiative of Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX documentary film festival that pairs a European and non-European filmmaker together to collaborate on a film via a CPH:DOX development grant. The 2012 program brought together Mexican-Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda with Denmark’s Jacob Secher Schulsinger, who has worked as an…
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The People Speak: Richard Linklater’s Bernie

By Adam Cook One could label Richard Linklater’s oeuvre “sideline cinema”: it exists on the margins of the popular film world. Unlike a Tarantino or Wes Anderson, “Linklater” is too diffuse to be a brand, his filmography too varied (trailers for his films ensure that he’ll forever be “the director of Dazed and Confused [1993]”)…
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