Quintin
The Club (Pablo Larraín, Chile)
By Quintin | | CS64, Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín The Club, the fourth feature by Pablo Larraín, is set in a small town in coastal Chile. There’s an unassuming house in this town that the Catholic Church runs as an open prison for priests who have committed serious crimes, sheltering them from the prying eyes of society. One priest (Father Vidal) is…
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Cannes 2014 | Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Mexico/Denmark/France/Germany/USA/Brazil)
By Quintin | | CS59, Festivals, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Spotlight, Top Ten Films 2014
By Quintín After the completion of his “Lonely Men Trilogy” of La libertad (2001), Los muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008), people started to say that Lisandro Alonso should do something different. Jauja answers that request: it’s a film with an international star (Viggo Mortensen), features characters who speak in full sentences, and boasts a script…
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A Liar’s Autobiography: The Return of Alejandro Jodorowsky
By Quintin | | CS56, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín More than 800,000 people follow Alejandro Jodorowsky on Twitter. Every day these lucky people get a couple of dozen pearls of wisdom (in Spanish) such as, “If you hate walls, you should learn to build doors,” or “The Visible longs for the Invisible, the Invisible longs for the Visible. You are also what…
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Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, US)
By Quintin | | CS54, Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín In one of the first scenes of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), a black soldier stands proudly and defiantly in front of the President and, without technically overstepping the bounds of respectfulness, argues that African-Americans (it sounds ridiculous to use that term in this context, doesn’t it?) deserve pay equal to that of white…
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Argo (Ben Affleck, US)
By Quintin | | CS53, Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín Argo might be thought of as Inglourious Basterds (2009) in reverse, or at least as a reply to Quentin Tarantino’s film. While in Inglourious Basterds, cinema teaches reality how things should have worked, Argo presents an example of how things really worked with the aid of cinema. Although extracting a few hostages from…
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Role Models: The Films of Matías Piñeiro
By Quintin | | CS52, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
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 three features (El hombre robado, 2007; Todos mienten, 2009; Viola, 2012) and a 40-minute film commissioned for…
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Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, US)
By Quintin | | CS46, Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín A couple of months ago, I watched Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) on TV. The film is marvellous for more than one reason (not just great, but truly marvellous). Among other things, it’s a correction of Easy Rider (1969), the juvenile blockbuster made a couple of years earlier. The proof that things are…
Read More The Decade in Review | Quintín
By Quintin | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Hong Sang-soo’s most recent film, Like You Know It All (2009), begins with a filmmaker arriving at a film festival in Korea, where he’s supposed to serve on the jury. Hong’s basic plots are usually triggered by his memories, and so some people call him a Proustian director, while others prefer Rohmerian, due to his…
Read More Features | Mariano Llinás and Other Argentinean Species: Beyond Official Cinema
By Quintin | | CS40, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín In 1999, as a jury member for Antorchas, a now-defunct private foundation that awarded endowments for the arts and the sciences in Argentina, I was reading a huge pile of scripts from filmmakers applying for something like $10,000 US in funding. One of those scripts, written by one Mariano Llinás, was completely different…
Read More Currency | Elite Squad
By Quintin | | Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Quintín Once upon a time there was a film called Z (1969), directed by a certain Costa-Gavras. The film is so old now, that if you look at the IMDB for a brief summary, you’ll find out that the Greek-set Z is about “the overthrow of the democratic government in Czechoslovakia.” Funny enough, the…
Read More Currency | The Exiles
By Quintin | | Currency
Quintin Kent Mackenzie, USA) By Quintin Shot around 1958 using ends of studio reels, premiered at the Venice film festival in 1961, and never released during the director’s lifetime, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles resurfaced for screenings a few years ago on the festival circuit thanks to the clips Thom Andersen included in Los Angeles Plays…
Read More Spotlight | Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, Chile)
By Quintin | | Spotlight
By Quintin Tony Manero is a strong film. By “strong” I don’t mean a good film, not even a solid film. It’s strong in the sense that it could not pass unnoticed. In the first place, this is because it comes from a rather unnoticed country in terms of film production—that being Chile. There is…
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