By Mark Peranson Gartenbaukino, Vienna, Austria, November 1, 2022 Mark Peranson (MP): You are not really a filmmaker who likes to interpret your films, but talks about them more in terms of process, about how the films are made. The Novelist’s Film (2022) is your 27th film. Your 28th film, Walk Up (2022), is showing…

Interviews and Features Back to Zero: The Experimental Cinema of Jean Eustache by Michael Sicinski Life Belongs to Us: The Eternal Return of Jacques Becker and Claude Sautet by Christoph Huber Master at Work: Paul Schrader on Master Gardener by Will Sloan Pictures of Flowers: On Recent Small-Gauge Filmmaking in and Around Spain by Phil…

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Interviews and Features Electroshock Therapy: Matthew Rankin on The Tesla World Light by Jason Anderson Quiet Savagery: A Tale of Two Tourneurs by Christoph Huber All You Can Eat: The 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…

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 unlikely sexiness—a quality steadily buried under layers of bad behaviour and cellulite, but still visible to the character’s lovers and the show’s audience alike. Gandolfini’s…

From Cinema Scope #55, Summer 2013 By Christoph Huber Claude Lanzmann’s last reworking of leftover materials from the rich archive accumulated for his groundbreaking epic Shoah (1985), The Last of the Unjust breaks with the rigorous approach its director previously employed to find a just way to talk about the Nazis’ mass murder of the…

Enfin, it arrives.  

As we await the editing and uploading of the roundtable, here are our Toronto-present writers’ selections of their favourite films they’ve seen during TIFF (in a cinema, in Toronto, during the Toronto International Film Festival). To wit, not the best films of the festival, as who could possibly be equipped to make that assertion, what…

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…

But tomorrow, this guy gets his:

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) hysterical female patient: a 19-year-old maid whose spectacular seizure suffered while ladling out supper to her employers gets her packed off to a sanatorium. Once…

Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese, Germany)—TIFF Docs By Adam Cook Camp 14 is not the most enjoyable film: it’s not easy to watch, it’s slow, and the subject matter is difficult territory, but it’s territory explored with commendable moral intelligence by director Marc Wiese. The main subject of the film is Shin Dong-huyk,…

Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada)—Special Presentation By John Semley Maybe the most frustrating thing about the debut by David Cronenberg’s twenty-aught son is that calling it “Cronenbergian” doesn’t really work: it’s less a value judgment on its glaring paternal influences than a statement of fact. To be sure, Brandon Cronenberg has inherited more than a genetic…

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 exploitation of its subjects. A related question: is it possible to exploit men who freely—and in some cases gleefully—admit to the torture, rape and murder…

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…

Short Cuts Canada By Hugh Gibson This year’s Short Cuts Canada section is cast into new light due to two recent developments.  First, with the elimination of Canada First (and before it, Perspectives Canada, the so-called “ghettos” for national cinema), it becomes the festival’s sole Canadian-specific program.  Second, with the sudden announcement that the Worldwide…

La cinquième saison (Peter Brosens, Jessica Woodworth, Belgium/Netherlands/France)—Wavelengths By Mark Peranson Once upon a blue moon there comes along a very special film so wrong-headed, so deeply, deeply ridiculous, but made with the utmost confidence, that a wide swath of critics, programmers, and spectators mistake its balls-out look-at-me! posturing for high-minded, state-of-the-earth profundity. Oftentimes this…

 Blackbird (Jason Buxton, Canada)—Discovery By Kiva Reardon The first film from Canadian director Jason Buxton is not without flaws, but it is these very problems which make it all the richer and beguiling, as it’s difficult to tell whether they are inadvertent or exacting and calculated. Set in the fictional rural town of Eastport—a perfect…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Après mai (Olivier Assayas, France)—Masters By Andrew Tracy As one is virtually a companion piece to the other, it is only natural to begin discussion of Après mai (Something in the Air) with Olivier Assayas’ 2002 memoir A Post-May Adolescence, just published in an elegant English translation by the Austrian Filmmuseum…

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…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Rebelle (Kim Nguyen, Canada)—Special Presentation By Kiva Reardon The year in cinema has been stamped with a modicum of magical realism. First up at Sundance was Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film routinely described as “lyrical” and “heartwarming.” Now there is Montréal director Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle, arriving at…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)—Special Presentation By Gabe Klinger The evolution in Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre towards impeccably researched, stunningly visualized mythological explorations of the American character in There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master represents a sterling 180-degree turn. Staying within a certain autobiographical comfort zone in his…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Wandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure of Museum Hours (Austria/USA)—Contemporary World Cinema By Robert Koehler “Kunsthistorisches. It’s the big old one.” This is how Vienna’s massive, venerable, lovely and, indeed, elderly central art museum is termed in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, and it neatly sums up the film’s warm,…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Lost in the Moment: Peter Mettler on The End of Time (Canada/Switzerland)—Masters By Jason Anderson After travelling through such far-flung sites as Detroit, Hawaii, India, and the geek-tacular labyrinth that is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Peter Mettler’s latest documentary finally leaves the material world altogether, arriving at a ripping…

1. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) 2. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr) 3. L’Apollonide—Souvenirs de la maison close (Bertrand Bonello) 4. Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler) 5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) 6. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) 7. Kill List (Ben Wheatley) 8.…

We’ve already discussed the majority of the features on this year’s Canada’s Top Ten list in some form or another in the pages of Cinema Scope or on Cinema Scope Online, many during our TIFF coverage. But as it’s still the time of year when film culture is obsessed with lists—writing them, reading them, arguing…

Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz, The Philippines)—Visions By Christoph Huber If you want the entire experience of the 68th Venice Film Festival bottled up into one grand (almost) six-hour marathon, surely there’s no better way than Lav Diaz’s Orizzonti sidebar closer, which was—as always seems to be the case with Venice screenings of the Filiipono…

Goon (Michael Dowse, Canada)—Special Presentations By John Semley A bloody ballet of hockey violence that, gracefully, never gets too balletic, Michael Dowse’s latest drops the gloves on neutered, toothless hock-u-dramas of the Score, Breakaway etc. variety. As brawler Doug “The Thug” Glatt, Seann William Scott further elbows his way out of typecast wincing douchebaggery, playing…

Elles (Malgoska Szumowska, France/Poland/Germany)—Special Presentations By Sergio Baldini In Elles, a female journalist from the woman’s magazine Elle (played by Juliette Binoche, whose presence reinforces the sub-Hanekean tenor of the film) is investigating student prostitution. She interviews two young women, one French, one Polish, living in Paris, who have turned to hooking to finance their…

Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve, France/Germany)—Contemporary World Cinema By Jay Kuehner Young love, Paris 1999. Surprisingly, there is no moratorium on the subject among French directors, not even the youthful Mia Hansen-Løve, who at 30 has three films to her credit that exhibit maturity beyond her years. Loosely autobiographical, Goodbye First Love is no exception…

Arirang (Kim Ki Duk, South Korea)—Real to Reel This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran)—Masters By Mark Peranson An amateurishly shot “self-interrogation,” the Cannes Un Certain Regard-winning film Arirang is cannon fodder for the enemies of director Kim Ki Duk, and of those the director rightly claims there are many; there…

Cinema Scope 48 Preview: City Sisters: Buenos Aires in the Spotlight at TIFF By Quintín One of my town’s most remarkable landmarks is a really awful globe made of concrete that sits on Main Street. It was donated by the local Rotary Club in association with some California branch of the institution. The reason for…