John Gianvito

Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, US)

By Jordan Cronk In a year when even the most perfunctorily political film has been deemed newly relevant, it’s a 58-minute observational documentary from 2007 that, by quietly surveying the United States’ progressive past, points most perceptively to the struggle that has faced the American Left since long before 2020. A history of violence and…
Read More

TIFF Day 3: Far from Afghanistan | Anna Karenina | Argo | Blancanieves | Clip | Hyde Park on Hudson | Juvenile Offender | The Land of Hope | Lunarcy! | Out in the Dark | Smashed

The Discomforts of Home: Far from Afghanistan (John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, Minda Martin, Soon-Mi Yoo, USA)—Wavelengths By Aaron Cutler and Mariana Shellard When Chris Marker gathered his Nouvelle Vague and Left Bank colleagues to make the omnibus film Loin du Viêtnam in 1967, nearly half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam…
Read More

The Decade in Review | John Gianvito

The value of the game of lists—if there is one—is that it affords one an opportunity to share one’s enthusiasms, to extol, to an imagined other, certain values one holds dear. Each of the films on my list is, by its very existence, a victory against the Cinema of Alienation and Distraction; each, in highly…
Read More