While I would never compare the end of a magazine’s run with the end of a person’s life, there is a painful appropriateness to the fact that I am eulogizing my friend, filmmaker Vincent Grenier, in the final issue of Cinema Scope. Grenier’s work represents a tactile, phenomenological cinema that is not very popular with current tastemakers.

By Michael Sicinski Hur Jin-ho made his reputation on a handful of romantic dramas that were distinguished by their light touch and quiet rigour. It would be easy to complain about how leaden and overdetermined A Normal Family is in comparison to Christmas in August (1998) or One Fine Spring Day (2001), but let’s be…

The Breaking Ice is as aimless as its characters, whose outer orbital of disaffection keeps them hovering around one another, wandering around and smoking and staring at the dazzling neon lights with more attitude than purpose. In other words, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been assayed much more poignantly years ago by Hou Hsiao-hsien or Jia Zhangke. 

By Michael Sicinski El Custodio (2006), the last of Rodrigo Moreno’s films to really gain traction on the festival circuit, was a grim but rigourous portrait of life at the periphery of power. The Delinquents is something else entirely. It’s a deconstructed film noir, not in the Derridean but in the culinary sense. Across its…

By Michael Sicinski  Ambitious but flawed, Four Daughters exhibits the signs of a director punching above their weight class. Ben Hania’s previous film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, was essentially one big metaphor looking for a context, and although there is inherent interest in Four Daughters’ true story—after a gradual radicalization, two eldest sisters…

Cody Lightning’s mockumentary, a pseudo-sequel to Smoke Signals (1998), received some vicious reviews following its world premiere at Tribeca. But to call the film aimless or declare it an outright shambles is to profoundly miss the point. In an industry that still demands positive images and model minorities, Hey, Viktor! is a self-portrait of the artist as a complete asshole.

An unassuming feminist drama that sneaks up on you, Inshallah a Boy lays out the facts of sexism in Jordan with precision, communicating its protagonist’s exhaustion directly to the viewer.

In making the transition from documentary to feature film, Brussels-based Cameroonian director Rosine Mbakam builds on her greatest strength, which is portraiture. Like Delphine’s Prayers (2021), Mambar Pierrette is an intensive look into the life of one overworked but resilient woman, struggling to keep her family afloat against all odds.

By Michael Sicinski In all likelihood, Frederick Wiseman is already prepping his next project. He is indefatigable. But if it happens that Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is his final film, it would be a fitting capstone to a singular career. After spending most of his filmmaking life producing incisive documentary analyses of dysfunctional institutions and lumbering…

By Michael Sicinski The governing formal conceit for Asmae El Moudir’s feature debut would have been more impressive had Rithy Panh not beaten her to the punch ten years ago. In working to explore the gaps in her childhood memories, as well as the history of oppression in Morocco under Hassan II, El Moudir reconstructs…

The third feature film by Filipino experimentalist Miko Revereza may be his most conventional work to date. But as one settles into Nowhere Near it becomes evident that this is by design. Where many of his previous films have addressed the almost hour-by-hour challenges faced by undocumented immigrants, here Revereza casts a somewhat wider net.

By Michael Sicinski Apolline Traoré’s latest film is direct, and in times of political strife there is undoubtedly something to be said for directness. Burkina Faso has become a hotbed of terrorism of late, with various factions affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara moving in from Niger and Mali. Meanwhile,…

By Michael Sicinski A fairly conventional film in punk attire, Spirit of Ecstasy suggests what might have happened if Lisbeth Salander had decided to go into finance. Claire Pommet, the singer-songwriter professionally known as Pomme, plays Jeanne, a 24-year-old military brat with an icy demeanour and a dizzying facility with applied calculus. They’re trying to…

By Michael Sicinski Godard’s first posthumous work could be taken as a suicide note for cinema itself. Throughout his career, Godard repeatedly aimed to “return to zero,” to unlearn the discipline of filmmaking and begin again. But certain axioms always persisted, such as images, motion, and temporal progression. Phony Wars goes back before zero, before…

As one watches the films in question—in particular Luna e Santur (2016), (tourism studies) (2019), and his newest film We Don’t Talk Like We Used To—one of the impressions one draws is that Solondz is also turning the quotidian home space into something else. We might call it “savage domesticity.”

By Michael Sicinski This year, along with his somewhat more experimental featurette Man in Black, Wang released Youth (Spring), a 3 ½ hour direct-cinema examination of life and work in the garment workshops in the city of Zhili. As the title suggests, most of these workers are young men and women, averaging around 22 years…

When a filmmaker’s body of work starts doing the rounds of the cinematheques and museums, it provides an opportunity for re-evaluation or discovery. Even for those of us who are familiar with the cinema of Jean Eustache, the current retrospective, which screens this summer at TIFF Cinematheque and other North American venues, is a substantial reminder that there’s a lot we still don’t know about this singular director.

Last Things, the latest work from Deborah Stratman, participates in a small but growing trend in experimental filmmaking. Following certain tendencies in contemporary philosophy, Last Things attempts to communicate a radically non-anthropocentric view of existence.

This is von Trier using the language of postmodernism, appropriation, and pastiche to remind us that The Kingdom is essentially a put-on. It would be impossible for any halfway attentive viewer to miss Exodus’ citations of Lynch, Maddin, Tarkovsky, Ghostbusters

By Michael Sicinski I am not a fan of Taylor Swift, or of Adam Curtis, really, although I think both of them get off a good line now and then. But I do think that Swift would be an excellent topic for a Curtis (or Curtis-style) investigation. That’s because Swift is the most successful example…

By Michael Sicinski Set in Das’s hometown of Assam, Tora’s Husband is centred on Jaan (Abhijit Das), a restaurateur who has struggled to make ends meet during the government-mandated COVID lockdown. But as the film continually emphasizes, Jaan did everything he was supposed to do. He paid his staff their regular wages while the restaurant…

By Michael Sicinski Saim Sadiq’s feature debut certainly has a lot on its mind, most of it centred on the problem of masculine stereotypes, and the tendency in traditionally masculinist cultures to equate machismo and authoritarianism with being a real man. Sadiq studied film at Columbia, and this no doubt offered him the chance to…

By Michael Sicinski Is it possible that some folks were too productive during COVID? It has become a common joke that almost nobody took advantage of the quarantine to write that novel or master a new language. But William Kentridge spent that time making a nine-part documentary about himself and his work. Based on the…

By Michael Sicinski Narrative reflexivity. Some scholars argue that it began with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, while others go back as far as Plato’s dialogues. In cinema, it’s been around pretty much from the beginning, with Edwin Porter’s 1902 short comedy Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, and Buster Keaton perfecting the form a few…

By Michael Sicinski First things first: Broker, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Korean sojourn, is considerably more competent than The Truth (2019), his ill-considered foray into superstar French cinema. But this is faint praise indeed. Broker finds the Japanese master transplanting his standard template with little in the way of cultural specificity or variation. His recent popularity has…

By Michael Sicinski An exceptionally bold programming choice by TIFF’s Wavelengths team, Moyra Davey’s feature expands on many of the conceptual tropes that have guided her photographs and video works for the past decade. In some regards a direct extension of her 2017 work Wedding Loop, Horse Opera finds the artist moving in front of…

By Michael Sicinski In film and especially on TV, this is a golden moment for wayward youths struggling to survive away from civilization. The Lord of the Flies template offers producers the opportunity to showcase new talent, and provides an excuse for the camera to linger over sweaty young flesh. But unlike, say, Yellowjackets, which…

By Michael Sicinski The feature debut of documentarian Erige Sehiri (Railway Men) is a perfectly agreeable film: it has screened at a number of festivals since premiering in the Quinzaine, and will probably end up playing to many appreciative audiences in the future, even as it remains rather schematic in its organization. Set during a…

Ordinarily when one is tasked to compose an obituary for a public figure, the writer can assume that the reader has some basic familiarity with the subject. This lends itself to a particular approach, which usually entails an expression of the subject’s significance to his or her field, some historical context for their achievements, and an overall reminder of the enduring value of their work. In the case of experimental filmmaker Jim Jennings, who died on May 19th, some of these assumptions are frustratingly inapplicable. 

Shortly before the close of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, word began to circulate that a very successful, cash-flush US distributor had snagged the rights to Nitram, the fifth feature film by Australia’s Justin Kurzel. Although the film didn’t seem to make much of an impression upon its Croisette premiere, the Spike Lee-led jury took notice of Nitram’s star, Caleb Landry Jones, giving him a somewhat unexpected Best Actor prize.

By Michael Sicinski Formalist though I may be, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate any given film from its association with Netflix. This is especially the case during awards season, as Netflix is throwing away obscene amounts of money on tacky gift boxes for critics and Academy members. The lavishly illustrated catalogues that depict every…

way through uncertain, liminal spaces. At the same time, the documentary marks a sharp turn in Speth’s filmmaking approach, something all the more notable given the remarkable consistency of her first four films.

Abel Ferrara is a changed man. While the evidence suggests that this is very good news for Ferrara himself and his immediate family, it could result in a minor schism in the manner in which his films are received. For most of his career Ferrara has been the subject of a Romantic cult that glorified his legendarily self-destructive behaviour, and often read this (literal) lawlessness as an integral part of his renegade creative vision.

Fern Silva’s films cannot be described as ethnography, personal/mythopoeic film, or essay filmmaking, although they often partake of all of those modes. Though his films are rooted in particular places and cultural spheres, they assiduously avoid the rhetorical or declarative traps of typical nonfiction filmmaking. Instead, they envelop the viewer in a diffuse but concrete ambiance, conveying the palpability of land and water, the weight of the air surrounding hills and trees. They represent a doubled physicality—the world as unavoidably there, inseparable from the cinematic substrate of 16mm filmmaking itself—and the result is a hybridized form of documentary “fiction,” in the classical Latin sense. Silva’s films are made, formed in the interface between reality and those human and mechanical processes that bring it into being.

By Michael Sicinski One of the best known of Steve McQueen’s early video works is Deadpan (1997), a four-minute, 35-second loop in which the artist simultaneously places himself in harm’s way and in film history. The piece is a recreation of the famous Buster Keaton stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) in which the façade…

One of the most surprising things about Ulrike Ottinger’s new documentary Paris Calligrammes is how accessible it is. Some cinephiles may be familiar with Ottinger based on an 11-year period of mostly fictional productions that were adjacent to the New German Cinema but, for various reasons, were never entirely subsumed within that rubric. Others are quite possibly more aware of her later work in documentary, in particular her commitment to a radical form of experimental ethnographic cinema.

Kantemir Balagov’s debut feature Closeness (2017) garnered significant attention on the festival circuit, for reasons both positive and negative. Primarily a look at an insular Jewish community in a small town in the north Caucasus, the film institutes a tragedy that tests the bonds of immediate versus extended family.

By Michael Sicinski Ja’Tovia Gary’s filmmaking is all to some extent grappling with the question of identity, particularly its precariousness in an often hostile world. Early films such as Cakes Da Killa: No Homo (2013) and An Ecstatic Experience (2015) explore the complex histories of African-American life, in particular the role of art and storytelling…

Although there have always been intrepid critics and cinephiles who have engaged with films belonging to the non-narrative avant-garde, there has existed a perception that such films, operating as they do on somewhat different aesthetic precepts, could be considered a separate cinematic realm, one that even the most dutiful critic could engage with or not, as he or she saw fit.

By Michael Sicinski This third feature film by Maria Sødahl is less a comeback than a new beginning. As the opening title card announces, Hope is based on a true story, although the director refrains from telling the viewer that the story is in fact her own. This knowledge certainly isn’t necessary, but it only…

By Michael Sicinski  Something sticky this way comes: Resin is not a very good film judged on its own merits, but it also has the additional misfortune of demanding a side-by-side comparison. The story of Jens (Peter Plaugborg), a delusional “naturalist” who has moved his family to the outskirts of town after faking the drowning…

By Michael Sicinski  Despite the fact that it is both preposterous and technologically untenable, a widespread ideology tends to enshroud childhood, proclaiming it a space to be protected from politics and social concerns, a zone of “innocence.” This is perhaps why, in the United States—a nation where a young person entering a school building doesn’t…

By Michael Sicinski Well folks, it’s September 2019, and here we have a late-breaking entry for Worst Film of the Decade. I’m not kidding, and I’m not levelling empty hyperbole. I have been a major supporter of director Arturo Ripstein and screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego in the past: The Beginning and the End (1993) and…

By Michael Sicinski Published in Cinema Scope #79 (Summer 2019) “Archaeology is about Digging” is the title of an essay by Thomas Heise, included in the DVD booklet for several of his films, including the 2009 film Material, a key film in terms of raising Heise’s profile outside of Europe. In the essay, the filmmaker…

“Archaeology is about Digging” is the title of an essay by Thomas Heise, included in the DVD booklet for several of his films, including the 2009 film Material, a key film in terms of raising Heise’s profile outside of Europe. In the essay, the filmmaker describes the circumstances surrounding the making of the films included on the disc, particularly those early works made while living in the GDR prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall

By Michael Sicinski  1. This is the story of a repetition. General Juan Perón was elected President of Argentina for the first time in 1946, and served two terms of office, from June 4 of that year through September 21, 1955. From 1946 through 1952, his first term, he ruled with his wife Eva at…

By Michael Sicinski The Vice of Hope gets its title from a rather sanitized version of a phrase spoken several times during the course of the film. What the characters are actually referring to is “the bullshit of hope,” and although Edoardo de Angelis’ film does end on a somewhat upbeat note, there is no…

By Michael Sicinski Welcome to Lithium-uania. This downcast, unassuming road movie is a small peak into the lives of ordinary young people who are losing the best years of their lives to mental illness, constantly wavering between a desire to accept help and a countervailing impulse they can’t necessarily trust. Are they actually better? Is…

By Michael Sicinski It’s a clever enough premise for an action-comedy. Surya (Abhimanyu Dassani) is born with a rare condition that doesn’t allow him to experience pain. And though this makes his childhood something of a minefield, short-circuiting the usual learning curve by which the rest of us humans learn to survive, it eventually leads…

By Michael Sicinski It’s certainly not news to anyone that the economic downturn of recent years has been particularly hard on the Greeks. But Her Job presumes that we won’t get the severity of the situation unless we watch a virtual simpleton get kicked like a dog by family and employer alike. This is a…

By Michael Sicinski Published in Cinema Scope 75 (Summer 2018)   I. In the opening minutes of Ulrich Köhler’s new film In My Room, things don’t seem right. In fact, it’s all a bit glitchy, and the unsuspecting viewer might very well wonder whether the DCP is malfunctioning. The scene appears to be the aftermath…

By Michael Sicinski Columbus, Ohio-based artists Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Leventhal’s video work (written about with customary perspicacity by…

By Michael Sicinski The Seen and Unseen is a truly singular film, but it does not relinquish its secrets easily. The story of two young twins, the girl Tantri (Ni Kadek Thaly Titi Kasih) and the boy Tantra (Ida Bagus Putu Radithya Mahijasena), who share an intense emotional bond that may extend beyond death, The…

By Michael Sicinski When someone makes their first film, it’s not uncommon for them to experience some difficulty controlling parameters such as style and tone. But Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir’s The Swan is something a bit more frustrating. For the first half of its running time, this Icelandic coming-of-age story is simply bizarre, taking visual and…

By Michael Sicinski Hannah is a bit of a paradox: it is an exceedingly quiet movie, and at the same time a bracing one, with a volatile, superstar performance at its heart. Charlotte Rampling plays the title character, a woman whose life has been dramatically upended just as she and her husband (André Wilms) should…

By Michael Sicinski Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts is a post-postmodern grab bag of genre moves and hollow gestures. At times it seems to want to be taken seriously, and at others it is content to revel in pastiche, very much like Ana Lily Amirpour’s films. How exactly are we supposed to take this…

By Michael Sicinski Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) Columbus, Ohio-based artists Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Leventhal’s video…

By Michael Sicinski Salomé Lamas’ experimental feature Eldorado XXI is a film that we might call a “modified ethnography,” in the sense that Lamas has gone to a particular location—La Rinconada y Cerro Lunar settlement in the Peruvian Andes—to observe both the landscape and those individuals who populate it. But as with a number of…

By Michael Sicinski In his 1995 interview with Scott MacDonald published in A Critical Cinema 3, Peter Hutton made a general assessment about his films, one that has been quoted quite a bit in the weeks since the filmmaker’s death. Let’s take a moment and consider it: “I’ve never felt that my films are very…

By Michael Sicinski It may be a painfully obvious point, but the simplest gauge of Miss Impossible’s unassuming success is to consider all the cheap, ingratiating tics you’d see in an American version of the same material. This is a very small film buoyed by a lead character, 13-year-old Aurore (newcomer Léna Magnien), whose snark…

By Michael Sicinski I have to hand it to TIFF. It’s one of the few film festivals in the West that still pays substantial attention to the “parallel cinemas” of India, even though the very idea of independent art film on the subcontinent has gone very much out of style. Back in the ’70s and…

By Michael Sicinski From its aerial opening shots of the massive urban crunch of Santo Domingo, zeroing in on one particular family in a corner of the slums, Jeffrey looks at first as if it’s going to provide a Dominican riff on City of God (2002). Thankfully, first-timer Yanillys Perez foregoes most of the clichés…

By Michael Sicinski Certain filmmakers tend to be reduced to memes. Hong Sangsoo, for example, makes the same film over and over again. The late Manoel de Oliveira made stodgy, “old man” films. Guy Maddin is a pastiche artist, Michael Haneke is a scold, Spike Lee lacks discipline, and Lars von Trier is a stunted…

By Michael Sicinski Initially talking stock of Mark Lewis’ new feature film Invention, I was reminded of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s remarks in his book Film: The Front Line, 1983 regarding Michael Snow. Rosenbaum compared Snow to Godard, and to another Lewis, that being Jerry. He wrote that Snow, JLG, and The Jer were interested “in fields…

By Michael Sicinski It’s a strange film that calls to mind both Out 1 (1971) and Sex and the City. But Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Happy Hour is defined by that odd tug between spacious, undirected improvisation on the one hand, and an incident-driven examination of the ups and downs of four women friends on the other.…

By Michael Sicinski Although some critics will undoubtedly refer to Saana Lenken’s film about teenage bulimia as Afterschool Special material, let’s be clear: no American or Canadian film would approach the seriousness or cruelty with which Lenken addresses her Swedish audience. More than once, the relationship between Stella (Rebecka Josephson) and her sister Katja (Amy…

By Michael Sicinski Given that these online reviews offer a comments section, I’d like to invite readers to chime in here, as if we were doing a radio call-in show: did anyone who attended TIFF this year, critic or regular filmgoer, actually see any of the City to City films? Honestly, I haven’t heard a…

By Michael Sicinski It’s been ten years since Wilson Yip’s SPL (unceremoniously retitled Kill Zone for its North American home video release), and apart from the reappearance of Simon Yam in a completely different role, there’s not much connection between the first film and this supposed sequel. Helmed by Milky Way protégé Soi Cheang (Accident,…

By Michael Sicinski Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest film, Park Lanes, is a real piece of work. By this I mean a few different things. For starters, I think it’s clearly one of the most significant achievements of his career. It’s also a film that’s fundamentally about labour—the conditions of its accomplishment and the patience required…

By Michael Sicinski P’tit Quinquin, the four-part miniseries that Bruno Dumont made for the ARTE network, had its world premiere earlier this year at Cannes as a 200-minute theatrical feature before screening to a record audience on French television in September. (It screened as a special presentation in the Fortnight, sort of a P’tit Quinquinzaine,…

By Michael Sicinski This is the directorial debut by Arraf, who is best known as the writing partner of Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis on his two most successful films, The Syrian Bride (2004) and Lemon Tree (2008). At the moment, Villa Touma is most notable for being a film that is “stateless,” officially speaking. Set…

By Michael Sicinski To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the chief business of cinema is business. As a general rule, festivals like films that can sell; Oscars and acquisitions provide high-level film programmers with industry niches that we critics will never really understand. But now and then, those thoughtful public servants manage to smuggle in something decidely…

By Michael Sicinski One of the stronger entries in this year’s showcase of Seoul-based filmmaking, Confession, by first-time helmer Lee Do-yun, takes a while to display its true intentions. Following a prologue in which we meet our three main characters as adolescents and witness a traumatic event that cements their long-term friendship, Confession jumps ahead…

By Michael Sicinski Songs from the North is a work that practically mirrors the provenance pattern of another film in this year’s festival, Kelvin Park’s A Dream of Iron: an essay film from a Korean-born, US-educated multimedia artist. However, Yoo is a more experienced filmmaker, and as a result Songs is a far more nuanced…

By Michael Sicinski This is an exceedingly slight debut film about an actress named Olivia (Loreto Aravena) beset by an endless barrage of calls from collection agencies, all looking for someone named Lorena Ruíz. In reality, there are some fairly basic steps to take if one finds oneself in a similar predicament. (I speak from…

By Michael Sicinski “In a world where everything seems programmed, even chaos, chance, or surprise, you’ve got to defy logic and bewilder people.” This is but one of the many lines of prose presented, without overt comment, in Le beau danger, written by the film’s subject Romanian author Norman Manea. However, this sentence seems as…

By Michael Sicinski This is a complete mess, but I cannot honestly say whether Zanussi constructed Foreign Body to be exactly the film he wanted it to be and thus he’s just off his rocker, or if he has simply lost control of the medium. How best to describe this unhinged but futile film? In…

By Michael Sicinski [Note: This review contains SPOILERS.] A few technical notes as we begin to talk about Lars von Trier’s latest film: 1) For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to Nymphomaniac as a single work, rather than treating its two-volume release as an integral part of its construction. 2) I will…

By Michael Sicinski When compared to its fellow Academy Award nominee The Act of Killing (2013), Joshua Oppenheimer’s supposedly radical examination of memory, myth, and representation in the construction of historical meaning, The Square probably comes across as reflecting a more conventional approach to documentary filmmaking. Its title, of course, refers to Tahrir Square, the…

By Michael Sicinski To say that Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA was a surprise winner at this year’s Venice Film Festival is something of an understatement. The film became the first documentary ever to win the Golden Lion, and was singled out by jury president Bernardo Bertolucci for its “poetic force,” and its “Franciscan” regard for…

By Michael Sicinski Not long after the release of Bruno Dumont’s third film, his infamous American folly Twentynine Palms (2003), James Quandt published his equally infamous polemic against the “New French Extremity” in the February 2004 issue of Artforum, where he placed Dumont on the naughty list right alongside Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Philippe…

By Michael Sicinski In a perfect world, film festivals would be filled with debut films as disciplined and poetic as Salvation Army, a film that first-time director Taïa adapted from his own autobiographical novel. This fact alone should be cause for consideration: How many filmmakers wallow in the self-indulgent excesses of autobiography? So few are…

By Michael Sicinski Over a decade in the making, The Dog is a relatively straightforward profile of John Wojtowicz, the infamous bank robber immortalized in Dog Day Afternoon. Chiefly constructed around extended interviews with Wojtowicz, The Dog benefits immensely from the man’s natural charisma. But the real star of the film is time. It’s not…

By Michael Sicinski Based on Matsumoto Hitoshi’s track record as both a filmmaker and comedian, we have every right to expect the unexpected. But what’s most surprising about his latest film is the fact that he has chosen to take an ostensibly outré subject (sadomasochism) and turn it into a bland mainstream adventure-comedy. To be…

By Michael Sicinski The Mari culture is a western Russian ethnic group positioned along the Volga who, after having nearly been wiped out by enforced Sovietization, is experiencing resurgence due to concerted preservation efforts on the part of contemporary ethnic Maris. The cinema of Alexey Fedorchenko is a key part of this; at the moment,…

By Michael Sicinski The not-so-New Romanian Cinema is still rocking and rolling, more than a decade after commanding the attention of major Western film festivals. This year the festival features strong entries by Corneliu Porumboiu and Cristi Puiu alongside this perfectly average national-spotlight programmer that, rather remarkably, nabbed the Golden Bear at the Berlinale this…

By Michael Sicinski Oh yes indeed, Sarah prefers to run. She prefers it to having articulate conversations, displaying recognizably human emotions, or demonstrating a capability to see her actions as connected to the larger world in any way. This character study of a young Québécer (Sophie Desmarais) whose track-and-field skills get her a spot on…

By Michael Sicinski If Pirjo Honkasalo was on the radar of North American cinephiles recently, it was probably with The Three Rooms of Melancholia, her acclaimed 2004 documentary about the Chechen War. Concrete Night is her first fiction feature since Fire-Eater in 1998, and although there’s no question that Honkasalo exhibits a master’s control of…

By Michael Sicinski Paolo Sorrentino has become a sort of go-to Italian auteur for the current regime in Cannes, without having a great deal of support elsewhere. Unlike some members of the International Cinema Scope Cabal™, I have remained somewhat agnostic toward Sorrentino, who is undoubtedly talented but committed to working in a highly unfashionable…

By Michael Sicinski [SPOILERS follow.] This Is Not a Film was a hybrid documentary wherein Jafar Panahi showed us what happens when a restless creative mind tries and fails to negotiate various end-runs around the absurd, maddening restrictions imposed upon him. In many respects, the more Panahi “failed”—famously walking off camera in tears, refusing to…

By Michael Sicinski This second film by Oliveira poses a few key questions. First, are European films schools necessarily doing the right thing by basing their training on the auteur theory? Bobô is beautifully shot and paced; the early shots of Sofia (Paula Garcia) in her meticulous, lifeless apartment are notably impressive for how well…

By Michael Sicinski In evaluating Southcliffe as a TIFF entry, I find myself thinking back to one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s very best lines of criticism: “Why insist on treating good baba ghanoush as if it were bad peanut butter?” We might then be forced to ask what we do, as gourmands or as critics, when…

By Michael Sicinski Probably the most remarkable thing about the whoa!-teur’s directorial debut is that it’s not a complete embarrassment. Given the fact that Reeves chose to make an ersatz HK actioner, the likelihood of a total fiasco was rather high, but Man of Tai Chi isn’t nearly that interesting. Reeves, together with fight choreographer…

From Cinema Scope #55, Summer 2013 By Michael Sicinski The first five shots of Ramon Zürcher’s debut film The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) serve as a kind of miniature map for this relatively short (72-minute), highly unusual work, neatly outlining the spatial compression and sonic misdirection that characterizes its aesthetic approach throughout. (Though…

By Michael Sicinski With its very title, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a film that announces itself as being in league with forces not entirely of this world. Nevertheless, its makers are two of the leading lights of contemporary experimental cinema precisely because of their pellucid examination of the world around them.…

By Michael Sicinski The first five shots of Ramon Zürcher’s debut film The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) serve as a kind of miniature map for this relatively short (72-minute), highly unusual work, neatly outlining the spatial compression and sonic misdirection that characterizes its aesthetic approach throughout. (Though in fact, any fragment of Cat…

By Michael Sicinski In Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012), you might have really seen a bear. That’s because it took place in a zoo. As for his latest, au contraire; the grizzlies are not really there. The title’s both a metaphor and a clue: the phrasing, like a picture book, implies that we should take a…

By Michael Sicinski Several seasons back, before The Office became an unwatchable shell of its former self, the Dunder Mifflin crew had a customarily awkward Halloween party. Stanley was confused about Andy’s costume, mistaking him for a Twilight character. Andy patiently explained that he was in fact dressed as Bill Compton from True Blood. “Oh,…

By Michael Sicinski As a teacher, two things I often find myself coming back to are Speed Racer and Jean-Marie Straub. Lest that sound willfully perverse, let me explain. We all have built-in aesthetic prejudices and predilections, based on our viewing histories and other extrinsic factors. Theorizing taste is a complex matter indeed. But as…

  By Michael Sicinski Untitled, 35 mm glass slides (Luther Price, USA) Phantoms of a Libertine (Ben Rivers, UK) A Minimal Difference (Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada) Shoot Don’t Shoot (William E. Jones, USA) Sorry Horns (Luther Price, USA) Orpheus (outtakes) (Mary Helena Clark, USA) Pipe Dreams (Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France) UFOs (Lillian Schwartz, USA) Although the first…

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 order using a random-number generating system. There were also additional sections that, according to the randomizing…

By Michael Sicinski 1. Every film does at least two things: it enters a broader social context, and it generates its own context. This seems obvious to the point of dullardry, but even by the usual standards of Hollywood blockbusters, the new Batman film (and allegedly final franchise entry—more on that below) emerged, like its…

By Michael Sicinski Twelve years on, the Jeonju International Film Festival’s Digital Project is only getting stronger. This unique endeavour, whose history and raison d’être has been amply chronicled elsewhere (notably by James Bell in Sight & Sound,), remains impossible to pin down. While the JDP has generally remained focused on Asian directors, the project…

By Michael Sicinski Whereas almost all other music-video directors function in much the same capacity as graphic designers, Michel Gondry, by dint of an unyielding artisanal approach, has made a place for himself analogous to that of an architect. Like Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenman, Gondry is called upon, in essence, to do what he…

By Michael Sicinski Is Terence Davies a radical conservative? Often one of the signs of a great artist is his or her ability to thwart the comfortable compartmentalization of our thinking, to dislodge the habits with which we navigate our ordinary existence. We are accustomed to thinking of a cinematic “mainstream,” organized around surface realism…

By Michael Sicinski A Separation is one of the year’s most accomplished films, and like so many films we might characterize as “accomplished,” it hasn’t garnered actual detractors. It merely fosters a coterie of skeptics. Several commentators felt that Farhadi’s film shouldn’t have won the Golden Bear over Béla Tarr’s more deserving The Turin Horse…

By Michael Sicinski 1. David Gatten’s cinema is probably the clearest articulation of a broader tendency in contemporary experimental cinema. Filmmakers working in this mode are equally influenced by Romanticist and Formalist traditions. Personal expressivity and objective rigour are not so much stances as they are strategies, poles along which to suspend oneself in a…

By Michael Sicinski This “serious” breakthrough by French comic director Michel Hazanavicius, best known for his OSS spy-flick parodies, is a head-scratcher, a problem that won’t go away, and above all an object that isn’t worth the ire of any hardcore cinephile. It’s basic mediocrity in a clever new disguise. One can take umbrage, I…

By Michael Sicinski Can there be such a thing as a productive political fantasy? This is far from a rhetorical question, and as I revisit Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film, which is without a doubt a political film for our times, I find myself grappling with this very question. This is because the idea of what…

By Michael Sicinski One could make a long, sad list of everything wrong with American independent cinema today, but one of the worst things about so much of it is just how desperate it is to be liked. There’s an ugly tendency to simultaneously flatter an audience’s supposed good taste and breeding (“look at you,…

By Michael Sicinski One of the difficulties of writing about experimental film and video is that there aren’t as many opportunities as there ought to be to spotlight filmmakers who we might call, for lack of a better term, developing talent. Magazines like this one (of which, sadly, there are few) customarily produce feature articles…