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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…
Read MoreExperimental film opus Sixty Six to screen in Toronto on May 24 Cinema Scope magazine is proud to present the Toronto premiere of Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six (2015), in partnership with the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and sponsored by The Beguiling. Date: Tuesday, May 24 Time: doors 6:30 p.m.; screening 7:00…
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From Cinema Scope #52 (Fall 2012) With Summer of Goliath (2010), Mexican-Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda finally began to attract well-deserved attention for his unique mode of hybridic fiction/documentary, an increasingly intricate formal gamesmanship that has been primarily based upon his collaborations with actors Gabino Rodríguez and Teresa Sánchez, playing son and mother. From Pereda’s first…
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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 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…
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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…
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Enfin, it arrives.
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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…
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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…
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But tomorrow, this guy gets his:
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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) 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…
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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,…
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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…
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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 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Cinema Scope 52 Preview Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)—Wavelengths Role Models: The Films of Matías Piñeiro By Quintín Like most of his colleagues in recent Argentinean cinema, Matías Piñeiro is a graduate from the Universidad del Cine, and, like many of them, works outside the national funding system. Born in 1982 in Buenos Aires, Piñeiro, despite…
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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,…
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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…
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If we’re typing this with hands that can barely move, that must be a sign that festival season in Canada has begun, yet again. Because something seems to be in the air regarding lists and numbers, and because why the hell not, this year’s goal for the Cinema Scope Online TIFF coverage is to top…
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Cinema Scope 52 Preview Blood and Thunder: Enter the Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, France/UK/USA)—Wavelengths By Phil Coldiron Let’s start with a coincidence. The title of Part I, Chap. 1 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Of Sense.” The name of the Harvard project headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose new film, made in collaboration with Véréna Paravel,…
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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.…
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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…
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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: Low Life (Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval, France)—Special Presentations By Andréa Picard “Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, directors, etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.” —Robert Bresson, Notes…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, US)—Special Presentations By Andrew Tracy If “indie-ness” conveys a certain generic intimation unto itself, some of the most celebrated recent independent films have also strategically adopted broader generic tactics, usually related to violence. As sensation, whether shockingly enacted or tautly withheld, has started to become…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman, France/US)—Real to Reel By Mark Peranson Over the last decade, I’ve realized that Frederick Wiseman devotees are incapable of critical thinking when it comes to their master. They fail to see (or refuse to acknowledge) that in composing his career-long grand narrative analysis, Wiseman sometimes loses sight…
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 denying us a look at her face for as long as possible. This is partly because the build-up is worth it—star Stephanie Sigman is as…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, Canada/Germany) By Richard Porton The title of Russell Jacoby’s 1983 polemic, The Repression of Psychoanalysis, suggests that the radical implications of the Freudian tradition have become muddled in an era where nothing seems more safely middle-class than a session on the couch with the shrink of…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, Canada) By Jason Anderson Few lives go untouched by some form of trauma or catastrophe, yet compassion is often the last thing we spare for the people who cross our paths, especially when there’s no obvious indication they might need anything from us. This point was elegantly…
Read MoreCinema Scope 48 Preview: Nicolas Winding Refn and the Search for a Real Hero By Robert Koehler “Hey, do you wanna see somethin’?”—Driver in Drive In the middle of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a film punctuated by extreme flourishes of violence and vengeance, there is a period of peace. It occurs when Driver (Ryan Gosling),…
Read MoreThe Toronto International Film Festival is not the epicentre of film culture, though it sure feels like it every year for two weeks in September. (If you live in Toronto, it becomes the epicentre of culture, period, for better or worse.) Usually, Cinema Scope limits its coverage of TIFF premieres to features and reviews in…
Read More1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 2. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu (Andrei Ujica) 3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz) 4. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) 5. Winter Vacation (Li Hongqi) 6. The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira) 7. I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke) 8. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly…
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