Search Results: Adam Nayman
…in sync to the author’s ramblingly… By Adam Nayman | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2020 TIFF 2020: Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman, US/Canada) By Adam Nayman The title character of Canadian…
Read More…More → TIFF 2020: Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman, US/Canada) By Adam Nayman | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2020 By Adam Nayman The title character of Canadian director Emma Seligman’s feature…
Read More…Cinema By Adam Nayman What an awful movie 388 Arletta Avenue is: pointless, derivative, ugly and completely superfluous. It does, however, represent a leap in terms of craftsmanship from director…
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…of the childhood home of one of their culture heroes (“Oh, I love Jack White!” coos Eve as Adam points out the former Stripe’s dead-weathered digs). Even as Adam repeatedly…
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…Grymm, from whom he gains acceptance and learns valuable lessons. Ultimately, however, Adam outgrows and surpasses his mentor—or, more precisely, betrays him. After numerous difficulties and setbacks, Adam finally triumphs….
Read More…By Adam Nayman | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2021 By Adam Nayman The indefatigable Michel Franco is back on his grind with Sundown, a companion piece to last year’s accomplished…
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By Adam Nayman The hands-down winner of the TIFF 2017 “Google the title to understand it” award, Pyewacket finds Adam MacDonald—who came to the festival in 2014 with a tough,…
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By Adam Nayman The Editor could have used one. Much like the previous Astron-6 production Manborg, this passionately scrawled love letter to Argento, Fulci et al makes a fetish of…
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By Adam Nayman The obvious point of reference for Adam McDonald’s feature debut is The Edge, except that there’s (more) sexual chemistry between the two leads. (Sorry, Anthony Hopkins and…
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By Adam Nayman Too grim for a straight-up YA audience and too goofy to be taken too seriously, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Freaks at leads owns its curious at-oddsness:…
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By Adam Nayman In a film filled with significant canines—from an accidentally immolated mutt to a prize police-unit sniffer to a redemptive purebred puppy—Michael Fassbender’s hangdog eyes are best in…
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By Adam Nayman “Do you want to hear about the daddy issues or the drugs?” queries Laney (Sarah Silverman) to her doctor on the first day of rehab; 28 days…
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…Tracy *This Is Not an Omnibus: The Jeonju Digital Project 2012 by Michael Sicinski Interviews Fast Company: David Cronenberg in Toronto by Adam Nayman *Terror Incognita: Julia Loktev on The…
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…King (Andrey Paounov, Bulgaria/Germany)—Real to Reel By Adam Nayman The boy in question is Simeon Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha, a child-monarch whose reign was severely truncated but who went on to prove that…
Read More…The Philippines)—Visions By Adam Nayman There are have been stranger pregnancies in the history of cinema than the one that yields a scaly offspring to a middle-aged couple in Fable…
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…The Magazine Read More → Support GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX TORONTO CS Online Show Biz Kids: Paul Thomas Anderson on Licorice Pizza By Adam Nayman Read More →…
Read More…pool, and Adam’s position with respect to it, as the dominant emblem of this blinkered response to Chad’s seemingly endless civil war. Adam’s resentment, together with his having to deal…
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…Happy Hour by Michael Sicinski Currency Carol by Phil Coldiron Anomalisa by Richard Porton (Subscribe) Bridge of Spies by Adam Nayman (Subscribe) The Visit by Adam Cook (Subscribe) Room by…
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Actress ADAM NAYMAN: While still far from elephantine, Columbia, Missouri’s annual True/False festival has grown just large enough to accommodate celebrity buzz—or at least jokey rumors that Soulja Boy was…
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Augustine (Alice Winocour, France)—Discovery By Adam Nayman Less Prestige-ious than David Cronenberg’s recent period-piece account of psychoanalytic one-upsmanship, the pre-Freudian drama Augustine actually gets down and dirty with its (diagnosed)…
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…like he’s serving up warmed-over rubbish, it’s good fun dining out of Žižek’s trashcan. Tout ce que tu possèdes (Bernard Émond, Canada)—Masters By Adam Nayman Whether or not Bernard…
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…Vice by Blake Williams Force Majeure by Angelo Muredda American Sniper by Michael Sicinski The Babadook by Adam Nayman ’71 by Jerry White Dumb and Dumber To by Adam Cook…
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By Adam Nayman When discussing all-time NBA greats, the knock on Kevin Garnett was always that he couldn’t carry a squad to a championship. For all his unprecedented versatility—the shooting…
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…and watchful, Adam (Jackson Martin) has just returned with his parents for another summer at their lakeside cottage near Thunder Bay. As Cividino demonstrated with his short—which he had intended…
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…Adam and his new friends, cousins Nate (Nick Servino) and Riley (Reece Moffett). At times, they barely seem to speak the same language, which may be one reason Adam is…
Read More…Jay Kuehner TIFF 2021 | A Hero (Asghar Farhadi, Iran) By Jay Kuehner TIFF 2021 | Sundown (Michel Franco, Mexico) By Adam Nayman TIFF 2021 | Zalava (Arsalan Amiri, Iran)…
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Interviews *The New Workout Plan: Denis Côté’s Ta peau si lisse by Adam Nayman Denis Côté’s Ta peau si lisse by Adam Nayman *Inner and Outer Space: Wang Bing Talks…
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…our TIFF Reviews section. Features & Interviews *The Rules of the Game: Paul Verhoeven’s Elle by Adam Nayman *Saying Something: The Films of Angela Schanelec by Blake Williams *The Wanderer:…
Read More…Revisionism-Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel By Adam Nayman The Tsugua Diaries (Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, Portugal) By Robert Koehler France (Bruno Dumont, France) By…
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…and Writings by Dan Sullivan Seeing Stones: On Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet’s Antigone by Phil Coldiron *Power of Attorney: Better Call Saul by Adam Nayman American-Made Murder: Ryan Murphy’s…
Read More…the physical logistics of masturbation by the time he was eight. Cuchera (Joseph Israel Laban, The Philippines)—Discovery By Adam Nayman Every conceivable orifice gets plugged in Cuchera, a purposefully…
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…Heroism of Howard Hughes by Adam Nayman Censoring Shakespeare: Ing K’s Shakespeare Must Die by Nathan Letoré Would You Like to See a Magic Trick?: Basma Alsharif’s Ouroboros and its…
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…to watch. The Last Gladiators (Alex Gibney, US)—Real to Reel By Adam Nayman Having not even seen Goon, I still feel safe in saying that Mike Dowse’s Seann William…
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…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 Adam Nayman The Case-Book of…
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…*Berlin by Jordan Cronk *Deaths of Cinema: Nothing Will Die: John Hurt, 1940–2017 by Adam Nayman Nirvanna the Band the Show by Jason Anderson *Global Discoveries on DVD by Jonathan…
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The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, Anonymous, Denmark/Norway/UK)—TIFF Docs By Adam Nayman Like most other documentaries about certifiably insane people, The Act of Killing raises questions about the…
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…n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau by Adam Nayman Donald Cried by Celluloid Liberation Front Free Fire by Julien Allen *Kékszakállú by José Teodoro Le quadrille, Aux quatre coins,…
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…Adam Nayman. ENJOY: Slavoj Žižek and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology by John Semley. No Sound Is Innocent: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio by Jason Anderson. Features A Murderer Cannot…
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…Shane Carruth – By Robert Koehler *After-School Special: Joseph Kahn’s Detention – By Adam Nayman *Middlegame: An Interview with Andrew Bujalski – By Phil Coldiron Features *An Ursine Halfabet: Denis…
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…TIFF’s Uneven Seoul Patch by Michael Sicinski Imaginary Love: Xavier Dolan’s Mommy by Adam Nayman Voices Off: The Films and Videos of John Smith by Samuel La France A Place…
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By Mark Peranson, Michael Sicinski, Alan Franey, José Teodoro, Tom Charity, C.W. Winter, Olivier Père, Robert Koehler, Olaf Möller, Adam Nayman, Gabe Klinger, Jason Anderson, and Andrew Tracy A…
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By Adam Nayman The supernaturally-inflected police procedural is a subgenre with international traction (as evidenced by the recent success of The Wailing), but while there’s surely something trendy about Malaysian…
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By Adam Nayman Or: Do the Wrong Thing. The protagonist of Joseph “Look What You Made Me Do” Kahn’s Eminem-produced 8 Mile satire (scripted by Toronto-area rapper Kid Twist) is…
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By Adam Nayman First things first: the funniest and probably finest episode of television produced in 2010—on par with much the Americans produced last year for the cinema—was “Steve Guttenberg’s…
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By Adam Nayman At the end of Sandy Wexler, the film’s eponymous Hollywood talent manager (Adam Sandler), who has come out the other end of a heart attack, grabs the…
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…of any new Adam Curtis film comes a deluge of coverage, commentaries, analysis, harangues, point-counterpoints, fact checks, further-reading lists, and good old-fashioned snark spread across an ever-expanding plethora of platforms….
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…in it. Anderson may still get called out for his narrative imperfections (see Adam Nayman’s summary of PTA’s faults and virtues in Cinema Scope 50), but there isn’t a cinephile…
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…with The Crowd (1928), his cinema has entered its visionary stage—and boy, let’s hope it stays in it. Anderson may still get called out for his narrative imperfections (see Adam…
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By Adam Nayman Let’s get it right out of the way: by any non-subjective metric—which is to say in spite of my own personal opinion—the Canadian filmmaker of the decade…
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By Adam Nayman For a pair of authentically brand-name filmmakers, Joel and Ethan Coen have a funny thing for pseudonyms and noms de plume. It’s common knowledge that they’ve edited…
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…Universe: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani on Laissez bronzer les cadavres by Christoph Huber Features The Uses of Disenchantment: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water by Adam Nayman The…
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…Mother Prevents It by Chuck Stephens Currency The Souvenir by Robert Koehler The Hottest August by Adam Nayman Diamantino by Angelo Muredda Too Late to Die Young by Josh Cabrita…
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By Adam Nayman The Occupy Wall Street protestors who assault the hapless Kenneth Park ( Bobby Lee ) near the beginning of A Very Harold and Kumar 3-D Christmas are…
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Interviews and Features *Audrey II: Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s MS Slavic 7; By Adam Nayman *The Exorcist: Barbara Loden and Wanda. By Courtney Duckworth. Presence and Poetry: Margaret Tait…
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…Cook We Are the Best! by Jason Anderson The Wind Rises by Jordan Cronk Why Don’t You Play in Hell? by Calum Marsh CURRENCY Inside Llewyn Davis by Adam Nayman…
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…Adam Nayman. COLUMNS *Editor’s Note: Top Ten of 2017 Film/Art Yto Barrada. By Jesse Cumming. Deaths of Cinema: Paul Clipson. By Max Goldberg Festivals Sundance. By Robert Koehler. Berlin. By…
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…Evan Johnson on The Forbidden Room and Other Stories by Mark Peranson In the Bedroom: Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare by Adam Nayman Circumnavigating Cinema: Kidlat Tahimik’s Balikbayan #1 Memories of…
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…Genèse and Les demons by Adam Nayman *Touch Me I’m Sick: Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell by Jason Anderson *First Person Plural: On Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the…
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…film’s conclusion, Sono offers sociopolitical marginalization and emotional compromises befitting Douglas Sirk. Check the Geiger counter: something’s in the air, all right. Lunarcy! (Simon Ennis, Canada)—TIFF Docs By Adam…
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…Perry and Joel Potrykus on Film Production, Distribution, and Reception Diary of a Mad Housewife: Robert Greene’s Actress by Adam Nayman Cold in July and Jim Mickle’s History of Violence…
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By Adam Nayman I won’t write too much about The Immigrant here, as Adam Cook has already ably reviewed the film (in Cinema Scope 55) and because for once, James…
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By Adam Nayman With Labor Day, Jason Reitman announced his intentions to become the new Sam Mendes. People should be careful what they wish for. Men, Women & Children could…
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…to the magazine, or consider the instant digital download version. Features What is Boyhood? by Gabe Klinger Hardbodies and Soul: The Professional Wrestler as Actor by Adam Nayman Game Theories:…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman “Did you notice anything suspicious?” asks a sign posted inside a ferry in The Ghost Writer. Well, of course you did: this is a Roman Polanski film…
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By Adam Nayman Last year, Tom Hardy came to TIFF with The Drop, a drab Brooklyn crime film that afforded its star the opportunity to talk like Adam Sandler; this…
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By Adam Nayman When Paul Rudd declared midway through Knocked Up that marriage was like a “tense, unfunny episode of Everybody Loves Raymond,” it was meant as a warning to…
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…& PJ McCabe’s The Beta Test by Adam Nayman Features *Journey to the Centre of the Earth: Fern Silva’s Itinerary by Michael Sicinski We Can’t Go Home Again: On the Films…
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…Cemetery of Splendour by Kong Rithdee Sleeping Giant by Jason Anderson Love by Blake Williams Columns Editor’s Note Canadiana: Canada’s All-Time Top Ten by Adam Nayman Deaths of Cinema: Manoel…
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By Adam Nayman Paul Thomas Anderson loves start-up entrepreneurs and fly-by-night schemes: you could run a straight line between There Will Be Blood’s (2007) oil magnate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis)…
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By Adam Nayman The other clog doesn’t drop for a good long time in Valley of Shadows, a half-enchanting, half-enervating Norwegian feature whose director tries to have his horror tropes…
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…Franco by Christoph Huber *Danger Zone: FX’s Archer by Adam Nayman *Sex, Death, and Geometry: A Conversation Between Alain Guiraudie and João Pedro Rodrigues on L’inconnu du lac Spotlight: Cannes…
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By Adam Nayman Pam: Speaking of, you see the bulge on that towel boy? Man, if I was you, I’d be in this spa 25/8. Cheryl: Yeah, but then I…
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…similarities creating something new and, quite happily, monstrous. Mumblecore stalwart Joe Swanberg (of the aforementioned Hannah as well as LOL [2008]) also stars in Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way to…
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By Alysia Urrutia While it’s ostensibly a bold gesture to reboot the pre-viral benchmark of independent cinema, Adam Wingard’s millennial sequel Blair Witch lacks what its cunning predecessor had in…
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…action-thriller franchise, abound in Adam Wingard’s latest, scripted by regular collaborator Simon Barrett. The comic-book political commentary of You’re Next—whose affluent and doomed paterfamilias was a retired marketing strategist for…
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…furniture while working the stage at Xquisite as Dallas’ prodigal son. When Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a college dropout crashing on his sister’s Brooke (Cody Horn) couch, finds his way on…
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By Adam Nayman As the titular Tom, co-screenwriter-director-producer-narcissist Xavier Dolan sports a tangled blonde dye job that screams “city boy” even louder than his Montreal accent. Decamping to the Québécois…
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By Adam Nayman Robert Redford dies at the end of All Is Lost. This is not, strictly speaking, a spoiler, as the climax of J.C. Chandor’s sophomore feature is calculatedly…
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By Adam Nayman In which a cult filmmaker spikes his own Kool-Aid. Ti West’s sloppily made and surpassingly tasteless movie slaps a Vice logo on its account of American documentarians…
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By Adam Nayman Stuffed-animal lovers beware: several very huggable toys are obliterated by shotgun blasts in Child of God, inanimate stand-ins for all the men and women and social institutions…
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By Adam Nayman First things first: in his final screen performance, James Gandolfini is pretty good. For all the years that he played Tony Soprano, Gandolfini’s secret weapon was an…
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By Adam Nayman The image of an aged Woody Allen facing down a tribunal of stone-faced rabbis near the end of Fading Gigolo is probably a keeper, and whatever else…
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By Adam Nayman Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a mechanical movie, and the machine it resembles is a duck press—an old-fashioned device, but darned if it doesn’t squeeze something out in…
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By Adam Nayman [SPOILERS, as they say, below.] In space, apparently, no one can hear you scream “Cut!” That’s the sensibility of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which unravels its tale of…
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By Adam Nayman Wrapping up the Toronto International Film Festival in Film Comment last fall, editor Gavin Smith praised Philomena and confused the Yucatan for the Philippines before bestowing his…
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…of Your Body’s Tears, by Jason Anderson Athens Decathlon: TIFF 2013 City to City, by Adam Nayman Temps mort: Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, by Andrew Tracy The Man…
Read More…regular readers of this magazine are well aware, I find the ideas of polls, surveys, and their ilk generally off-putting, for many of the reasons elucidated in Adam Nayman’s article…
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By Adam Nayman Despite its ruggedly physical mien, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is a haunted movie, possessed by the unavoidable spectre of its smash-hit predecessor The Exorcist (1974). Even as he…
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By Adam Nayman It’s not HBO, it’s (French) TV, and it’s also paradoxically the best movie that Bruno Dumont has made since L’humanite (1999)—a good point of comparison because Li’l…
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…review of Michael Mann’s latest (which Adam Nayman has already raised an eyebrow at for Cinema Scope Online). It’s unclear from this header, or the article that follows, whether its…
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By Adam Nayman Back in September, when the world was young, I opined in this space that Maps to the Stars was its director’s worst movie in fifteen years….
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By Adam Nayman It’s a measure of Michael Mann’s self-awareness—and, all evidence to the contrary, he must have some—that over the course of Blackhat Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) gets to…
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By Adam Nayman A semi-surprise winner of the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best First Film award, Jennifer Kent’s Sundance breakout The Babadook feels very much like a debut even…
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By Adam Nayman Nina Hoss has one of the great faces in cinema, so it’s perverse to see it swaddled in gauze at the beginning of Phoenix. Strapped into the…
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By Adam Nayman Early on in Foxcatcher, the eccentric and bottomlessly deep-pocketed John du Pont (Steve Carell), heir to an American munitions dynasty and a collector of expensive military gadgets,…
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Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner By Adam Nayman TIFF All-Time Top Ten 1. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001) 2. Mon oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971) 3. The Sweet Hereafter…
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By Adam Nayman A stray line about a “Dr. Viridiana” early in The Duke of Burgundy gives the game away: after the giallos humour of Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland…
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Miss Violence By Adam Nayman You can probably trace the idea—or at least the exact etymology—of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave” back to a 2011 Guardian article by Steve Rose….
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By Adam Nayman If Satan came back and saw the movies that were being made in his name, he’d never stop throwing up (pea soup, probably). Our Dark Lord is…
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By Adam Nayman In which a lapsed Halifax folkie very gradually gets her groove back. It’s every bit as thrilling as it sounds. Look: it’s clear that writer-director Andrea Dorfman—making…
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By Adam Nayman If Matt Porterfield were a basketball player, he’d be the skinny two-guard who curls stealthily off of screens and puts up quality shots, who you don’t even…
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By Adam Nayman A film ideally screened at film festivals—where its scenes of characters logging into hotel wi-fi on their laptops and thrashing around in the throes of jetlag will…
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By Adam Nayman Call it the [REC] of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This third and (I’m guessing) worst sequel to the 2007 Spanish found-footage horror flick is set at sea, for…
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By Adam Nayman “I’m not going to hire a fucking thief,” exclaims a character early on in Nightcrawler, and while the name-check of Michael Mann’s debut feature is likely entirely…
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By Adam Nayman Nick Broomfield’s limey knight-errant act has had its moments of wearing thin—as in the terrible Sarah Palin: You Betcha!—but at its core it’s clever, endearing and effective….
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By Adam Nayman “You exist,” says Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) to his wife Sandra (Marion Cotillard) in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night—a line which echoes another in Ms. Cotillard’s…
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By Adam Nayman It’s hard to recall a recent movie that’s whiter than Force Majeure, and not only because it’s set in Sweden. Ruben Östlund’s third film takes place at…
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By Adam Nayman In 2014, in a fictional Canada, Xavier Dolan’s fifth feature Mommy doesn’t get much attention at all… It’s a fine line between utopia and dystopia. To say…
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By Adam Nayman Early on in Foxcatcher, eccentric billionaire John du Pont (Steve Carell) expresses his frustration about the indifference afforded to young men who’ve served their country. That the…
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Bird People By Adam Nayman A film seemingly made to be screened at film festivals, where its scenes of characters logging into hotel wi-fi on their laptops and thrashing…
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By Adam Nayman “I tend to break things,” says Brandy Burre early on in Actress, and Robert Greene’s film gives her plenty of opportunities to validate this claim. An aggressively…
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By Adam Nayman David Cronenberg’s worst movie in fifteen years finds him playing his usual home game on foreign turf. Los Angeles in Maps to the Stars feels just as…
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By Adam Nayman **SO, SO MANY SPOILERS BELOW** It’s one thing to get a lesson in remedial spectatorship from a professional scold like Michael Haneke, whose films can sometimes feel…
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By Adam Nayman Cate Blanchett’s best film performance remains her slight but crucial supporting turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1998). Playing Meredith Logue, a nouveau-riche heiress who has trained…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman It’s appropriate that Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn’s feature debut premiered in Locarno in the Filmmakers of the Present competition. More than any other film I saw…
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By Adam Nayman Trolling through the dispatches from Cannes, I’ve yet to read one review of Midnight in Paris that invokes La Jetée (1962). This is possibly because in a…
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…it had already created in the novel context of a live concert performed alongside images and sequences from Denis’ films. Audience response has been warm (see Adam Nayman’s report on…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman Put on the spot in an interview about why there were so many lens flares in his reboot of Star Trek (2009), J.J. Abrams joked that it…
Read MoreGreen Crayons By Adam Nayman The mission statement of the Toronto-based production company Medium Density Fibreboard Films expresses a desire to focus on “projects that display a strong sense of…
Read MoreThe Joy By Adam Nayman It was perhaps inevitable that my karaoke selection during a Jameson-soaked next-to-last-night party for the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival was “It’s The End…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman A berserk sugar rush of a movie featuring a cast so uniformly young and supple that Roxanne Mesquida registers as a veteran presence, Kaboom has been heralded…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman On the long list of film-critical clichés, asserting that a new release represents a “return to form” for its maker(s) rests somewhere near the middle, between describing…
Read MoreNatalie Gavin as Andrea Dunbar By Adam Nayman “I’ve got loads of childhood memories, but none of them are really good.” These words are spoken early on in The Arbor…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman To begin with, a Gondrian image: a boy sticking his superhero doll out of the window of a moving car to create the appearance of flight. Thus…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman “How do people do it?” This is the question posed by Marina (Ariane Labed) to her best (and only) friend Bella (Evangelina Randou) in the opening scene…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman Aaron Katz’s films are marked by a quality that’s unusual in American cinema: his characters really always seem to be listening to each other. This sense of…
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…Be a Man (Jan Zabeil, Germany)—Visions By Adam Nayman Actually the river here is not a man, but a metaphor for an outsider’s attempted immersion in a different culture. If…
Read More…a recent interview in the Los Angeles Times, Reitman considers this his “most personal film to date.” What does it say, then, that it’s shallow and disingenuous garbage? —Adam Nayman…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman “Family is a stab in the heart,” snarls Vincent Gallo as Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro. It’s a remark that cuts two ways: the blood that flows from…
Read MoreBy Adam Nayman Michelange Quay’s impressive debut feature Eat, for This Is My Body begins with a tracking shot that glides across the sea, passes over the shore and then…
Read MoreDiary of the Dead (George A. Romero, US) By Adam Nayman It matters not a whit that Diary of the Dead is a dreadful movie: its themes are easily discernable,…
Read MoreBy Violeta Kovacsics and Adam Nayman At the end of Lisandro Alonso’s second feature Los muertos (2004), the arrival of the long-journeying lead character at his former home constituted a…
Read MoreEncirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy (Richard Brouillette, Canada) By Adam Nayman In an interview conducted at this year’s Hot Docs festival, Montréal-based filmmaker Richard Brouillette recalled being inspired by a viewing…
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…Uptight By Andrew Tracy *I Lost It at the Movies: Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind and I’m Thinking of Ending Things By Adam Nayman *Open Ticket: The Long, Strange Trip of Ulrike…
Read More…Kuehner Read More → TIFF 2021 | Sundown (Michel Franco, Mexico) By Adam Nayman Read More → TIFF 2021 | Zalava (Arsalan Amiri, Iran) By Madeleine Wall Read More →…
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Interviews Show Biz Kids: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza by Adam Nayman What Lies Beyond: Michelangelo Frammartino on Il buco by Jordan Cronk Features Higher Power: Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta and…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico) – Contemporary World Cinema By Adam Nayman The opening sequence of Miss Bala clings closely to its main character while coyly…
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…George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot, in a raw fit of patricidal rage. Killer Joe (William Friedkin, US)—Special Presentations By Adam Nayman It was a dark and stormy night, and then…
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By Adam Nayman Pulling into a gas station to fill up after a morning spent doing errands, Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) witnesses a speeding car barrels over a stray…
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…Adam Nayman I once called Kim Ki-duk a “singular” filmmaker in a first draft of a capsule review and was upbraided by my American editor for displaying a distinct lack…
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By Adam Nayman Taking its title from Steely Dan’s barbed, the-kids-aren’t-alright tract “Show Biz Kids” and its plodding, piano-driven beat from Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets,” Frank Ocean’s single…
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By Adam Nayman Before it’s even begun, Cannes 2013 is off to a dubious start with The Great Gatsby. Even if nobody really expected this latest version of F. Scott…
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By Adam Nayman In Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead—which pointedly but pointlessly drops the definite article from its title—the demonic spirit is willing and the flesh is as weak as it…
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By Adam Nayman No American filmmaker in recent years has put his money where his mouth is like Joseph Kahn, the director of music videos for artists including Britney Spears,…
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By Adam Nayman Even if they didn’t say it in print, there were plenty of Toronto critics who suspected that Sarah Polley was being disingenuous when she claimed her sophomore…
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By Adam Nayman Like most other documentaries about people who are certifiably insane, The Act of Killing raises questions about the exploitation of its subjects. Namely: Is it even possible…
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By Adam Nayman The amateur-hour pas de deux that climaxes Silver Linings Playbook is the best indicator of what the film’s director thinks he’s doing the rest of the time….
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By Adam Nayman Keep the Lights On begins with a very modern kind of masquerade: from his single bed in a Brooklyn apartment, Erik (Thure Lindhart) tries to sell himself…
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…the Adventure of Museum Hours by Robert Koehler *Golden Girls: Sean Baker’s Starlet by Adam Nayman Anything But Cinephilia: A Public Conversation with Leos Carax by Olivier Père Return to…
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…song and the Truffaut B-side. No (Larrain): The analog fable. Adam Nayman Tabu (Gomes) The Master (Anderson) Viola (Piñeiro) The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, Cynn, Anonymous) Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor, Paravel)…
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…they’re funniest, which they are a good deal of the time. The Sessions (Ben Lewin, USA)—Special Presentation By Adam Nayman It would be easy enough to dismiss The Sessions…
Read MoreMark Peranson, Robert Koehler, Jason Anderson, Adam Nayman and John Semley hash out the best, worst and in-between of TIFF 2011….
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By Adam Nayman A prize winner at both Sundance and Cannes, Beasts of the Southern Wild has made an industry darling of its 29-year old writer-director Benh Zeitlin and a…
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By Adam Nayman One of the great joys of David Wain’s Role Models (2008) was the way that it satirized live-action-role-playing culture while also conceding the appeal—and even exhilaration—of attaining…
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By Adam Nayman In a 2007 interview with Filmmaker magazine, Craig Zobel opined that “there’s something sexy and cool about being a scam artist…it just never fully lets you empathize…
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By José Teodoro and Adam Nayman Cosmopolis opens with a hubcap-level pan across a fleet of white stretch limousines, objects of ostentatious wealth, absurdly oversized and ugly, yet invisible in…
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By Adam Nayman The first sign that Take This Waltz is going to be too writerly comes in the very first scene, when Toronto parks worker Margot (Michelle Williams) is…
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By Adam Nayman A textbook example of international co-production funds well spent—note the flashy film-festival slots from Park City to Manhattan—Brooklyn arrives duly hyped, and disappoints just as reliably. Encouraged…
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Crank: High Voltage By Adam Nayman Two men on fire: the burnt cranium of the title character in Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s new Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance unmistakably…
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…Christmas and New Year’s to seriously consider what Rutger Hauer murdering scores of Nova Scotian day-players might mean for the state of Canadian cinema. —Adam Nayman Jason Anderson is the…
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By Adam Nayman MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD The claw hammer that makes mulch of an amateur pornographer’s skull in the midpoint money shot of Kill List is a blunt instrument wielded…
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By Adam Nayman In his review of Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, J. Hoberman informs us that its protagonist, 37-year-old hack writer Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), “packs up and drives back…
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Karamay By Adam Nayman I’m not sure what the small clutch of filmmakers, buyers, distributors and other assorted festival-goers with a hole in their early-morning schedules got out of Jan…
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By Adam Nayman The past is rear-projected in Igor Drljaca’s sophisticated second feature; while the exact nature of the (student?) film being shot on a soundstage in the film’s centrepiece…
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By Adam Nayman [MAJOR SPOILERS ahead] Lest anybody doubt that Gone Girl is a comedy, consider that it includes, in no particular order: a scene where America’s favourite bad actor…
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By Adam Nayman More funny games from the ringleaders of the New Greek Cinema: in a country that invented bread and circuses before Rome was even a gleam in a…
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By Adam Nayman There is a shot of an infant being carried by its father in Claire Denis’ L’intrus (2004) that may be the most rapt and tender image of…
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By Adam Nayman The subtext of Atom Egoyan’s latest mid-late-career work is that you shouldn’t be mean to people online—a plaint that looks retrospectively prophetic in light of the film’s…
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By Adam Nayman Good thrillers live or die by their specifics, and Clifton Hill is nothing if not precise about its tourist-trap environment (the Canadian side of Niagara Falls) and…
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By Adam Nayman Tammy’s also always yelling—and cursing, and drinking, and threatening suicide, and making a messy spectacle of herself in public and private. That’s just who Tammy is, and…
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By Adam Nayman With Waves, Trey Edward Shults goes for broke; another way to put it is that he’s writing cheques that his filmmaking can’t cash. Even leaving aside the…
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By Adam Nayman You learn something new every day: for instance, I didn’t know that redheads were considered bad luck on the open seas, hence the chilly reception for bookish…
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By Adam Nayman The swift, ruinous descent from normalcy into substance abuse is hardly a subject lacking for cinematic treatment, and Joey Klein’s Castle in the Ground offers one more….
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By Adam Nayman That Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe mutually lose their shit over the duration of The Lighthouse is not a spoiler: sequestered together off the coast of Nova…
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By Adam Nayman The more things change, the more they stay the same, and the conspiracy-minded 1950s resonate in a zeitgeist in which everything feels accessible and occluded at the…
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…film professor played by Cinema Scope’s own Adam Nayman asks with disinterest early in Lev Lewis, Yonah Lewis, and Calvin Thomas’ smart and puckishly funny new film, seemingly pleased with…
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By Adam Nayman It is, it seems, the End of the World as We Know It. Forty-two years after R.E.M. wrote the West’s definitive apocalypse-now anthem, the song’s essentially optimistic…
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By Adam Nayman Canadians don’t do sequels. Or at least we don’t do them that often: Don Shebib went Down the Road Again again in 2011, and Bruce McDonald got…
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…Adam Nayman Encore: Dora García’s Segunda vez by Michael Sicinski Learning to Live Together: Three Films by Beatrice Gibson by Phil Coldiron Woman with a Whip: The Transgressive Westerns of…
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Paul Ahmarani (Lehrer Perrier) © beforfilms By Adam Nayman On the basis of Les démons (2015) and his latest film Genèse—I haven’t caught up yet with Copenhague, a Love Story…
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By Adam Nayman With five minutes to go in Jojo Rabbit, I laughed out loud. One of the actors (not one of the famous ones) got off a good line…
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By Adam Nayman It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life: that’s the thesis (and arguably the most expensive-to-license hook, assuming friend-of-the-director Adele offered hers for free) in Xavier Dolan’s The Death…
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By Adam Nayman There is a shot of an infant being carried by its father in Claire Denis’ L’intrus that may be the most rapt and tender image of its…
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By Adam Nayman The second movie in as many award-season cycles to feature scenes depicting the inner workings of The Washington Post, The Front Runner stakes out its distance from…
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By Adam Nayman Or, Bad Mamans. There’s a genuinely intriguing idea at the centre of Duelles, in which a pair of suburban mothers as well-manicured as their respective lawns engage…
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By Adam Nayman Playing a weathered LAPD lifer in Destroyer, Nicole Kidman looks like she’s been Dragged Across Concrete; her Erin Bell is the kind of hard-driving, harder-drinking detective who…
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By Adam Nayman It’s a town full of losers and they’re pulling out of there to win: that’s the premise of Jasmin Mozzafari’s Firecrackers, which expands the director’s 2013 short…
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By Adam Nayman The red, white and blue split-screen that showcases the horny, house-partying girls of Assassination Nation is the first—and maybe best—bit of neo-Godardian gamesmanship in Sam (son of…
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By Adam Nayman The De Palmia-ish split diopter shot in the opening sequence of Rojo is an allusion that also suggests its own distinctive usage. Positioning the camera just behind…
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…The Morals of Nature: Lee Chang-dong on Burning By Jordan Cronk FEATURES Exchange Rate: The Silent Partner at 40 By Adam Nayman Transgressions in the Dark Age: The Films of…
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By Adam Nayman “I think Toronto is a wonderful town, smart and up to date, just like a good American city…makes me feel like I’m back home in Cleveland.” These…
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By Adam Nayman Accepting the Golden Lion at Venice for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro magnanimously offered this piece of advice to young filmmakers: “Have faith in whatever…
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By Adam Nayman William K.L. Dickson’s Sandow (1894) is a three-part documentary study of the Prussian muscleman Friedrich Wilhelm Muller, who adopted the more flamboyant nom de plume after he…
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By Adam Nayman The stories of H.P. Lovecraft teem and crawl with terrifyingly malleable creations, yet paradoxically resist cinematic adaptation; more than most weird tales, they exist to be beheld…
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Back to the Future By Adam Nayman The news cycle waits for no one, not even J. Hoberman. Opening up the former Village Voice critic’s new book Make My Day—the…
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By Adam Nayman On paper (where it was doubtlessly first written, probably with a typewriter, 30 years ago) Joel and Ethan Coen’s script for Suburbicon evokes sinister, postwar domestic melodramas…
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By Adam Nayman The title character of Canadian director Emma Seligman’s feature debut is technically the 18-month-old blonde moppet sired by affluent nebbish Max (Danny Deferrari) and his shiksa-goddess wife…
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…Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel by Adam Nayman Global Discoveries on DVD by Jonathan Rosenbaum Exploded View | Suzan Pitt by Chuck Stephens Festivals Seeds of Change:…
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By Adam Nayman The indefatigable Michel Franco is back on his grind with Sundown, a companion piece to last year’s accomplished or objectionable (depending on who you ask) New Order….
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By Adam Nayman From the director of both Hot Tub Time Machine movies (there was a sequel, remember) comes a probing, emotional relationship drama. “What if it doesn’t work?” asks…
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By Adam Nayman Tapped for a spectacularly thankless civil service gig in a dilapidated Ontario backwater, Frank (Sverre Hagen) interviews for the job in front of a panel that includes…
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By Adam Nayman “This is the unwieldy version of the movie,” said Quentin Tarantino on the Pure Cinema podcast in June about his new 400-page novelization of Once Upon a…
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…Psychomontage No. 1 by Chuck Stephens CURRENCY Petite maman by Courtney Duckworth Azor by Jay Kuehner Faya Dayi by Jesse Cumming Zack Snyder’s Justice League by Angelo Muredda New Order by Adam Nayman…
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By Adam Nayman “Mexico’s upper classes are asking for trouble,” Michel Franco told Variety last fall. With New Order,trouble has found them. The deep-crimson dress selected by prosperous newlywed Marianne…
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…Pelechian’s La Nature by Phil Coldiron Minority Report: Armond White Wants to Make Spielberg Great Again by Adam Nayman F for Fake: Mank by Andrew Tracy Minimalist Maximalism: The Hilarious Horror…
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By Adam Nayman The “About the Author” section of Armond White’s new critical anthology does not disappoint. In the space of four short paragraphs, White is identified as “esteemed, controversial…
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By Adam Nayman “It’s all planned, but it isn’t thought out,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a nifty bit of critical jiu-jitsu…
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By Adam Nayman If you believe that the worst thing a movie can do is pass unnoticed, then Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Violation might be for you. Deliberately taking…
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By Adam Nayman “A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film, blocked before the furnace of the projector,” intones Alexandra Stewart in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), testifying…
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By Adam Nayman Having not read Kirk Lynn’s 2015 novel about a feral cult of squatters, I can’t say if Rules for Werewolves qualifies as a proper adaptation or a…
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…Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan by Adam Nayman Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs by Phoebe Chen TV or Not TV Too Old to Die Young by Christoph…
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By Adam Nayman The sterile, corkscrew expanse of the Guggenheim is a concrete geometric presence in Point and Line to Plane, which takes its title from a 1947 book of…
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By Adam Nayman Toronto’s Fox Theatre plays itself in Inconvenient Indian, which opens by sending Thomas King—author of the 2012 critical study that give the film its title and rhetorical…
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By Adam Nayman The one direct allusion to assisted suicide in Every Day’s Like This is filtered through movie madness: discussing a potential date for the euthanasia of their terminally…
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By Adam Nayman “Fuck you,” whispers 12-year old Beans (Kiawentiio) to her reflection in the mirror, a playful gesture of self-deprecation that’s also a rehearsal for external clashes. It’s July…
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By Adam Nayman Metaphor blooms in As Spring Comes, which reconfigures a frosbitten ice-fishing shack into a literal hothouse. Sheltered inside with her lover in what seems to be a…
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By Adam Nayman A significant change of pace for Bosnian-Canadian filmmaker Igor Drljaca after a run of Balkan-themed hybrid fictions and docs, the sci-fi-inflected The Archivists concerns a trio of…
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By Adam Nayman A weary, wary weed dealer with decades on his odometer, Akilla (Saul Williams) operates self-effacingly under cover of the Toronto night; staring down the barrel of a…
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By Adam Nayman The most arresting image in the new BBC Studios series Trigonometry (airing in the US this summer on HBO Max and in Canada on CBC Gem) comes…
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By Adam Nayman Good commercial Canadian directors are hard to find—except in Québec, where money and audiences exist to make the effort seem worthwhile. Yet none of the province’s hitmakers…
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…Patricia Mazuy by Lawrence Garcia Spotlight: The Decade in Canadian Cinema Long Live the New Flesh: The Decade in Canadian Cinema by Adam Nayman Jodie Mack by Sofia Bohdanowicz Corneliu…
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…with the benignly nationalistic idea of focusing on what transpired in Canadian cinema over the past decade, but with a twist. After a general survey by Adam Nayman focusing especially…
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Interviews Anything Is Possible: Josh and Benny Safdie on Uncut Gems by Adam Nayman A Concept of Reality: Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral by Daniel Kasman Fairytales and Freudian Females: A…
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By Adam Nayman Filming Drake (billed as a “rapper/actor,” in a nod to his Degrassi stint) in front of some dinosaur skeletons at the Royal Ontario Museum is the wittiest…
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…Lattimer The Math of Love Triangles: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Trigonometry by Adam Nayman Features “In Search of the Female Gaze” by Erika Balsom The Limits of Control: The Militant Cinema…
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By Adam Nayman Ian McEwan specializes in preposterous plots, and The Children Act is as contrived as anything in his posh, voluminous, award-winning repertoire. (I don’t have an official number,…
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By Adam Nayman Dito Montiel’s Man Down is a visionary work of abstract cinema—a haptic masterpiece that overwhelms the viewer through the sheer scale of its imagery. Then again, I…
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…get payback. Deservingly discussed as they were by Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope 50, I shall give these key Statham works undeserved short shrift—ditto for Paul W.S. Anderson’s awesome Death…
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By Adam Nayman “How do I find you? Who do you turn to?” A very Malickian line of inquiry, but these words do not emanate from any of the many…
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By Adam Nayman If we can begin with a parlour game—and on the evidence of The Hateful Eight, our American Psycho laureate Quentin Tarantino is lately beloved of such Funny…
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…Essay by Roger Koza, Interview by Francisco Ferreira & Julien Gester Notes on Camp: An Interview with David Wain By Adam Nayman Necessary Means: Isiah Medina on 88:88 By Phil…
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By Adam Nayman In the exciting climax of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp—the eight-part Netflix prequel to David Wain’s 2001 cult comedy about a Jewish summer camp…
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By Adam Nayman “Welcome to the land of the free,” growls self-styled border patrolman Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), mere moments after shooting up a group of Mexicans trying to sneak…
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By Adam Nayman No, it’s not an alternate title for the Thatcherite satire of High-Rise: Rebecca Miller’s abrupt slide into conventionality after a string of spiky efforts follows the Machiavellian…
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By Adam Nayman Real-life stories don’t come much more metaphorically resonant than that of Steve Fonyo, the B.C.-born amputee who followed in Terry Fox’s footsteps in a cross-Canada run for…
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By Adam Nayman One hopes that Bruce McDonald’s heart wasn’t in Hellions. At times, it’s feeble enough to be mistaken for backyard filmmaking, except that it lacks the joy—the getting-away-with-somehing…
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…doubt Maddin has or cares to, but Adam Nayman’s review can be found here tomorrow. One niggling criticism: at a scant 30 minutes it’s far too short; surely the last…
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By Adam Nayman Canada, Fuck Yeah. Written, directed, starring, and narrated by Paul Gross—close-shorn and bearded like a badass—Hyena Road tries to show that war and war movies aren’t just…
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By Adam Nayman For generating the mental image of Chad Kroeger getting head from Sloane from Entourage, The Steps warrants scorn; it’s a weak Canadian movie indeed that has to…
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– Better Call Saul _ Season 2, Episode 8 – Photo Credit: Ursula Coyote/ Sony Pictures Television/ AMC By Adam Nayman “Better Call Saul is the shit and looks like—wait…
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By Adam Nayman It’s the Time of the Wolf, Canadian-style. But where big bad Michael Haneke quickly gets his apocalypse on the Road, Patricia Rozema keeps her characters in the…
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By Adam Nayman All Dalton Trumbo ever wanted was his name on an Academy Award, and the same goes for the people who’ve been entrusted with telling his life story….
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By Adam Nayman “In war, truth is the first casualty,” Aeschylus assures us on the opening crawl of Eye in the Sky, which only partially accounts for why Gavin Hood’s…
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By Adam Nayman Freed from the constraints of shooting Instagram-style for Xavier Dolan, André Turpin amply fills the wide screen in this, just his third feature in 20 years. Hopefully,…
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By Adam Nayman Everything about this fact-based account of French aid workers plotting to transport African orphans back across the Atlantic to pre-paid adoptive parents—under the guise of a fictitious…
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By Adam Nayman As ambulatory mammalian metaphors go, a manacled and toothless lion is pretty shaggy stuff: chained passively outside a Gaza Strip hair salon operated and populated by a…
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By Adam Nayman What Kim Gordon is doing in an arty, Berlin-set German genre movie is anybody’s guess, but the strangeness of her extended cameo as an empathetic high-school English…
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By Adam Nayman With Kazakhstan going to the dogs, young Ilyas decides to run with the wolves. Stranger isn’t officially an adaptation of The Jungle Book, but there’s more than…
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By Adam Nayman Anne Émond bests fellow French-Canadian whippersnapper Xavier Dolan in the Now-That’s-What-I-Call-’90s-Music department in Les êtres chers, as Blind Melon and Elliott Smith give way to Pulp (“Common…
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By Adam Nayman Double Dutch hitmen, separated by a swamp and gunning for each other at the behest of a mutual colleague with his own agenda and no scruples: the…
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By Adam Nayman Murder, masturbation, melancholy, molly—this is one overstuffed Canadian debut feature. Perhaps they should have cut the talking hamster. That said rodent squeaks with the voice of Isabella…
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By Adam Nayman Surely the most demure manga adaptation in cinematic history—there isn’t a single bad-touching tentacle in sight—Our Little Sister finds Kore-eda Hirokazu in Ozu mode. With its numerous…
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By Adam Nayman In the waning days of 2015, public intellectuals as varied as Salman Rushdie, Bill Maher, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar floated (or sky-hooked) the notion that Donald Trump was…
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…Honda’s Style by Phil Coldiron Imagining Disaster: The Videos of Calum Walter by Samuel La France Uniquely American Symptoms: The Manchurian Candidate by Adam Nayman *Last Action Hero: Jason Statham…
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By Adam Nayman A decade after her youthful debut Tout est pardonné (2007), the now-35-year-old Mia Hansen-Løve has become a veteran. But she’s always been an old soul. Her films…
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By Adam Nayman In Elle, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) slaps her adult son in the face, sleeps with a hammer under her pillow, deliberately smashes into her ex-husband’s car and later…
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By Adam Nayman Three Peaks opens with a man and a child struggling to hold a conversation underwater in a fancy resort swimming pool; it’s a witty visual pun pointing…
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By Adam Nayman He just can’t help himself. Unless my memory is failing me, Memento-style, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is the first World War II movie — and I suppose, provided…
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By Adam Nayman The pivotal moment in The Disaster Artist—James Franco’s absorbing, hall-of-mirrors adaptation of Greg Sestero’s combination memoir/tell-all about his participation in the making of The Room, which some…
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By Adam Nayman The ’80s-style Hollywood body-swap comedy gets a purposeful and political makeover in High Fantasy, an inventive and entertaining South African feature that cleverly yokes heavy subject matter…
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By Adam Nayman Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) William K.L. Dickson’s Sandow (1894) is a three-part documentary study of the Prussian muscleman Friedrich Wilhelm Muller, who adopted the…
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By Adam Nayman. Call it Two Angry Men: Ziad Doueiri’s courtroom drama applies a stolid, old-fangled Sidney Lumet-ness to a geographically and historically disparate cultural context. The setting is Beirut,…
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By Adam Nayman “Are you a piece of shit?” This is the question being pondered by 29-year-old Mary (Aya Cash), who suspects that she might be and knows for a…
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By Adam Nayman He just can’t help himself. Unless my memory is failing me, Memento-style, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is the first World War II movie — and I suppose, provided…
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By Adam Nayman It’s all in the wrist. Buried beneath layers of latex as John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), the only part of John Hurt that…
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