Dennis Lim
The Dream’s Dream: Lisandro Alonso on “Eureka”
By Dennis Lim | | CS95, Festivals, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Interviews, Spotlight
I write this open letter with profound frustration and disappointment over the programming decisions made for this year’s Cannes. As a filmmaker who has poured my heart and soul into creating thought-provoking and artistically daring works, I cannot help but express my vehement opposition to the relegation of my film, Eureka to the Cannes Première section.
Read More 
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France)
By Dennis Lim | | CS51, Festivals, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Spotlight
By Dennis Lim The media gauntlet is so much a part of the Cannes infrastructure that Leos Carax’s decision to withdraw from it was both bold and telling. Despite having one of the most talked-about films at this year’s festival with Holy Motors, Carax granted no interviews, and his public pronouncements were confined to a…
Read More 
Worlds of Possibilities: Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler’s Dreileben
By Dennis Lim | | CS46, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Dennis Lim After a decade-long procession of HBO critical darlings, in the wake of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos and now Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce, received wisdom holds that television—or more precisely, its funding structures and serial configurations—represents our best hope for narrative filmmaking. Such pronouncements tend to assert the benefits of duration and scope, the…
Read More The Decade in Review | Dennis Lim
By Dennis Lim | | The Decade In Review
David Lynch is not an overlooked filmmaker and Mulholland Drive is not a film in need of championing—quite the contrary, since it has already won the decade-end critics’ polls of several other publications. Still, this near-unanimous canonization is not just surprising but suggestive in ways that have largely gone unremarked. It’s worth taking a moment…
Read More Spotlight | Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers
By Dennis Lim | | CS40, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Spotlight
By Dennis Lim It is perhaps redundant to call Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers a provocation. For starters, the title is meant literally. Korine’s fourth feature—his second after emerging from the widely documented downward spiral that nearly ended his career, and his first to be shot in his hometown of Nashville since his 1997 debut, Gummo—chronicles…
Read More Interviews | One from the Heart: Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales
By Dennis Lim | | From Cinema Scope Magazine, Interviews
By Dennis Lim For the first question of the Go Go Tales press conference at Cannes, moderator Henri Behar asked Abel Ferrara to describe Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge, the Manhattan strip club where his new film is set. “It’s a place where you go and they wait on you and you’re in a tuxedo and…
Read More Spotlight | João Pedro Rodrigues
By Dennis Lim | | Spotlight
By Dennis Lim Is there still such a thing as queer cinema? On the one hand, Cannes 2009, where every other movie seemed to have a gay character, theme, subtext, or sensibility, could be seen as a reflection of a “post-gay” cultural climate, where onscreen homosexuality is so ubiquitous that its existence barely seems worth…
Read More 
Support
