By Jason Anderson Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) “Strange people, the Etruscans,” one character muses in Alice Rohrwacher’s new film. “They believed the flight of birds predicted destiny.” It’s unclear exactly what La Chimera’s protagonist—played with the requisite brooding intensity, and a half-decent grasp of Italian, by English actor Josh O’Connor—is able to divine when…

The image of Paul Mescal lost and losing himself in a crowded, strobe-lit dancefloor is the most haunting leitmotif in Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, a film that would be acutely musical in feel and structure even if it weren’t powered by such a carefully curated selection of underappreciated late-’90s UK chart faves (All Saints and Chumbawamba included). As glimpsed in the flickering light, his face expresses both the loved-up chemical bliss expected of the era’s aging ravers and a more disquieting sense of vacancy; it’s as if he’s not all there. And while that phrase risks being more suggestive of some garden-variety weekender blasted

By Jason Anderson Published in Cinema Scope #92 (Fall 2022) The image of Paul Mescal lost and losing himself in a crowded, strobe-lit dancefloor is the most haunting leitmotif in Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, a film that would be acutely musical in feel and structure even if it weren’t powered by such a carefully…

With the arrival 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. The resulting cacophony makes one of the fundamental appeals of Curtis’ practice—his seeming ability to wrest a temporary sense of order and coherence from a dense matrix of ideas, factoids, fragments, and audiovisual ephemera from deep within the BBC archive that otherwise threatens to feel as disordered and disorienting as everyday life—seem all the more valuable.

It’s one of the most cunning ironies in Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam (2018) that just beyond the edges of the screen that dominates the protagonist’s existence is… another frame. It’s one of those chintzy, gilded affairs that an earlier generation of art enthusiasts used to spruce up velvet Elvis paintings, Margaret Keane knockoffs, and other garage-sale treasures; you’d also find them around mirrors in hotels you never visit twice.

By Jason Anderson The phony magazine cover glimpsed in the early moments of Her Smell may not have the same heady metatextual allure as that of so many journals invented out of whole cloth and newsprint for narrative purposes, like the must-read issues of Dorgon and Kill Weekly on the newsstands in Blade Runner (1982)…

By Jason Anderson Published in Cinema Scope 76 (Fall 2018)   The phony magazine cover glimpsed in the early moments of Her Smell may not have the same heady metatextual allure as that of so many journals invented out of whole cloth and newsprint for narrative purposes, like the must-read issues of Dorgon and Kill…

By Jason Anderson Alan Zweig’s Hurt is steeped in failures, not all of them belonging to the film’s unholy trainwreck of a subject, Steve Fonyo. In 1984, four years after a similarly valiant effort by Terry Fox that won the hearts and minds of the nation, the 18-year-old cancer survivor from Vernon, B.C. began a…

By Jason Anderson Almost 90 per cent of Canada is uninhabitable. Of those who live in the rest, the overwhelming majority live within 500 miles of the US border. So maybe it’s not so surprising that the nation’s filmmakers—themselves largely clustered in the same few square miles of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal—regard the hinterlands with…

By Jason Anderson Simone Rapisarda Casanova says that there is a Borges story so deeply embedded in his brain that only a lobotomy could remove it. Such a surgery would be suitably Borgesian in and of itself, but he should be safe from it in the meantime. The story, he explains, is “The Aleph,” a…

By Jason Anderson Though hardly as adventurous (or merciless) as some of his Austrian peers, Götz Spielmann nevertheless created two bracing portraits of adults behaving badly in Antares and Revanche, his two most celebrated features. And just as the former film was smart enough to skirt many of the clichés of the “Hey-these-miserable-people-are-all-connected!” mode that…

By Jason Anderson Full credit goes to Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver for making a national portrait that thoroughly rejects the heartwarming dictums of CBC radio producers, government tourist officials, and any other purveyor of folksy Canadiana. An ultra-lo-fi animated travelogue based on a cross-Canada hitchhiking trip that the pair took in 2000, Asphalt Watches…

By Jason Anderson Any viewer in need of a primer on the semiotics of the giallo film will be well-served by the opening moments of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears. In commencing their second full-length effort after their similarly arresting debut Amer (2009), the Belgian husband-and-wife team of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet…

By Jason Anderson For all the delight it takes in displaying the hard, shiny surfaces of its celebrity subject’s beloved “Austrian rhinestones,” the luxury automobiles he buys on a whim, and gilded crap of every variety, Behind the Candelabra reserves its most ardent attention for a certain array of body parts. Indeed, three of them…

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 pool of sounds and images that rates as the most splendiferously trippy sequence of the filmmaker’s career. Yet there’s…

By Jason Anderson For Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow to take such a slow and tortuous path into wider circulation seems oddly appropriate for a movie that seems not only anachronistic but downright atemporal. After escaping a rift in the space-time continuum in order to premiere at the Whistler festival in late 2010, it…

By Jason Anderson For a director to craft a movie that could inspire young viewers to become filmmakers themselves was a well-worn ambition long before the making of Super 8. But leave it to Martin Scorsese to trump J.J. Abrams by fashioning a slice of pure incandescent wonder that’ll have tykes telling their parents they’d…