This is the complete list of articles from Cinema Scope issue 51. * Articles available online Features *Get Out of the Car: David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis  by José Teodoro and Adam Nayman *Eight Footnotes On a Brief Description of Footnotes to a House of Love, and Other Films by Laida Lertxundi by Phil Coldiron Holy Terror: Robert…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum 1. Two special four-disc sets have become available this quarter to fill in sizable gaps in our grasp of Eastern European cinema during the mid-20th century. First, Polish Cinema Classics from Second Run in the UK, gathering together Andrzej Munk’s Eroica (1957), Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train (1959), Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerors (1960),…

By Adam Nayman In a 2007 interview with Filmmaker magazine, Craig Zobel opined that “there’s something sexy and cool about being a scam artist…it just never fully lets you empathize with the person on the other side of it.” He was referring to the fact that his debut feature Great World of Sound (2007) included…

By John Semley Kubrick has his monolith, Lynch his voyeur peering through the closet door, Spielberg his countless shots of faces wide-eyed and slack-jawed, awash in the wonder of some off-screen astonishment, all images that singularly apprehend broad authorial sensibilities. It’s been hard to narrow in on any one characteristic image that defines the cinema…

By Andréa Picard Twenty years ago, when under the rule of a sole dictator, we knew well whose wrists deserved to feel the sharp ends of our knives. Today, in a society so quick to judge and pass blame, the only flesh that remains to be examined is our own. Diaz’s camera, steadfast, unwavering, reveals…

Editor’s Note Back to business as usual, which means being crabby about Cannes and printing long articles about filmmakers nobody has heard of. We’ll get to Cannes later on, with pieces dispersed throughout Issue 51 and also resting in the typical centre-square spotlight. For now I would rather devote my allotted space to some observations…

By Robert Koehler It was either a sign of the measure of the complete revulsion felt by those who had worked with previous Quinzaine des Réalisateurs director Frédéric Boyer, or an expression of relief that the 44th edition was coming to a conclusion (or both), that new director Eduoard Waintrop was thanked from the Theatre…

By Tom Charity Hand it to Cannes: where else do art films get booed? On the rest of the planet, your typically well-adjusted art-house aficionado understands to appreciate whatever challenges the filmmaker has set…or the viewer walks out. To be sure, there are walkouts here too, but a good many hardier souls take it upon…

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…

By Mark Peranson This year’s 65th anniversary Festival de Cannes provided the only logical answer to one of the persistent questions in any veteran journalist’s go-to kit: How can Cannes get any worse? Festival-wise, we have a rough idea of what we’re in for under the decade-long reign of Thierry Frémaux: a parade of (mainly)…

By Jay Kuehner Despite the elemental grandeur of its setting and the irony of its title, The Loneliest Planet (2011) hinges neither on the cruelty of nature nor of civilization, but on the betrayals endemic to interpersonal relationships. A deceptively minimal and decidedly haunted pastoral tour that follows a couple of affianced Americans trekking through…

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 Phil Coldiron …A group of young people1 in the California2 desert.3 A radio.4 A house that’s little more than the idea of a house.5 A woman6 crosses a room, passes by the camera,7 says, “You’re leaving me…”8   1. What does it mean to make youth cinema in America today? While Hollywood aged parabolically…

By José Teodoro and Adam Nayman Cosmopolis opens with a hubcap-level pan across a fleet of white stretch limousines, objects of ostentatious wealth, absurdly oversized and ugly, yet invisible in their anonymity and ubiquity, luxurious yet barely able to move through a teeming city’s daily traffic. A great deal of David Cronenberg’s film, which spans…

By Chuck Stephens Start with the title, as you would a William Carlos Williams poem: Serene Velocity (1970)—tranquil and accelerating, blissful and fleet. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating, faster and faster, in space. Now look at the screen. SUNY-Binghamton grads will recognize the place: filmmaker Ernie Gehr taught there at the end of the…

By Christoph Huber Besting Bille August by a year, it has taken Austrian director Michael Haneke only four to join what we cynical film critics like to call the Emir club: the allegedly prestigious circle of two-time Palme d’Or winners, hitherto occupied only by Kusturica (1985, 1995), August (1988, 1992), and the Dardennes (1999, 2005).…