By Dan Sullivan Published in Cinema Scope #78 (Spring 2019) “The way I see it, movies move,” James N. Kienitz Wilkins declares in his monologue film This Action Lies (2018), made for Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève’s Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement. A styrofoam cup of coffee is viewed several times, with fluctuations in gradient distinguishing…

Rare these days is the filmmaker who proclaims that cinema is firstly a medium of ideas rather than of images and sounds, and few have made the case as strongly as James N. Kienitz Wilkins.

By Dan Sullivan Full disclosure: An issue of this publication (CS 70, to be precise [Ed. note: not cleared for use]) appears laid atop the desk of Glen Topher (Louis C.K.), the creatively blocked but nevertheless richer-than-God television writer/producer whose daughter China (Chloë Grace Moretz, surely a career-best turn) moves into his opulent penthouse in…

By Dan Sullivan On paper, what could be more sordid than an interview-portrait with Issei Sagawa, the infamous cannibal who became a tabloid sensation in the early ’80s after he murdered and ate part of a Dutch woman in Paris? Caniba, the new film by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, doesn’t exactly skimp on the…

By Dan Sullivan Alain Gomis’ first film since 2012’s Aujourd’hui unfurls leisurely, with a precision, patience, and sense of musicality, embodied on a somewhat literal level by the chansons sung by its magnetic protagonist. The set-up is slightly elemental, which may be the point: by night, Kinshasa native Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu, a Congolese…

By Dan Sullivan Cinema Scope: Good Time has a propulsive feeling of forward momentum, a kind of punchiness, which was also present in flashes in Heaven Knows What (2014). Your work has always been marked by a chaotic energy—but here it’s so consistent and sustained. Was that always the idea for the film, and how…

By Dan Sullivan For the past few years, Ted Fendt has been one of the busiest under-the-radar figures in film exhibition in New York: a projectionist at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he is also the city’s go-to live-subtitler of rare, unsubtitled prints of French films, and ranks among its most active moviegoers. But…