This is the complete list of articles from magazine issue of Cinema Scope issue 55. We post a few selected articles from each issue on the site. For the complete content, and to help Cinema Scope continue, please subscribe to the magazine, or consider the instant digital download version. * Articles available available free online Features and Interviews *Pretending…

Through the muddy fog of mental and physical exhaustion, Issue 55 of Cinema Scope is brought into the world, and my weary womb bears multiple scars. This number holds a special place in my heart as I was born at 5:55 in the afternoon (55 was my high-school basketball number), and I was up until…

By Phil Coldiron It starts with a look. And then another, and another, and before you know it 90 minutes have gone by in a rush of looks, because that’s all anyone does in Los Angeles—they look. The fact of it is that most of this looking is at the back of someone else’s car…

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…

By Kiva Reardon The title of Destin Cretton’s first feature suggested that the director knew his audience. Premiering at Sundance in 2012, I Am Not a Hipster seemed tailor-made for the festival’s indie-centric crowd: focusing on a lovesick California indie musician, the film sketched a spot-on portrait of young white male malaise, awash in scruffy…

By Andrew Tracy A ways back, in Cinema Scope’s saddle-stitched days, I speculated (à propos Eagle Pennell’s excellent The Whole Shootin’ Match [1978]) on the curious dynamic between regional and “national” (i.e., New York and Los Angeles) filmmaking in the US. The fact is that the majority of successful regional filmmakers do not remain regional…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum 1. At last, Pere Portabella’s long-awaited and much-delayed Complete Works, beautifully and simply produced. It comes in a compact box from Intermedio: seven DVDs containing 22 films (six features and 16 shorts, at least if one film as long as 50 minutes counts as a short), from Don’t Count on Your Fingers…

By Chuck Stephens I Hollis Frampton is speaking: “Whatever is inevitable, however arbitrary its origins, acquires through custom something like gravitational mass, and gathers about itself a resonant nimbus of metaphoric energy.” II Anatomy of a break-up: shit flies apart. Experimental filmmaking titan Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass—a lock-groove valentine from a young lovers’ meltdown-already-in-progress—was filmed…

By Blake Williams First, bless Charles Tesson for having the balls to acknowledge that experimental cinema exists, no matter that its manifestations at Cannes are still ghettoized to a damp auditorium in the gaudy Miramar hotel, located somewhere around the halfway point to Antibes. The fact that Tesson has spent his two years as artistic…

By Boris Nelepo Nothing is true. Morals are dead. There are no more laws. The end of history is nigh. So says Fabian (Sid Lucero), a law-school dropout who sees no point in legislation in a world devoid of reason. Permanently in debt, he whiles away the hours gabbing and griping about the humiliation his…

By Christoph Huber Daily reporters at film festivals dread few demands from otherwise uninterested editors as much as “the festival’s overarching theme”: along with weather reports, these requests crop up with dispiriting regularity. As if a limited selection of movies (circumscribed by all kinds of necessities and strategic manoeuvers, at times more than artistic merit,…

By Kong Rithdee Handcuffed to Ryan Gosling in the nightmare that is my home city, let me walk you through the checklist. Elephant: Yes.  Eastern mysticism: Yes. Muay Thai: Yes. Monks or monk-like figures: Yes. Nocturnal Bangkok in the claws of neon light, in a lesser-Lynch lurid trance: Yes. Flummoxed foreigners lost in a labyrinth:…

By Robert Koehler Jia Zhangke is not an artist who normally trucks in anger. In an era when film criticism and programming have been steadily shifting away from a focus on nationalist tendencies, led by filmmakers who’ve become globalized along with the rest of us, Jia has maintained a steady bead on his native Mainland…

By Mark Peranson Yeah, you’re thinking to yourself, where does our correspondent go now? Will he make an at-long-last about-face and christen the S.S. Frémaux with a bottle of Dom Perignon, to celebrate, after 13 years of puddling about in the shallow waters off the Côte d’Azur, its maiden voyage into the high seas of…

João Pedro Rodrigues: I’ve watched L’inconnu du lac twice, and now realize that the film takes place over ten days. Alain Guiraudie: Yes, you’re right. Rodrigues: Only on the ninth day do you omit the establishing shot of the parking lot, which introduces all the other nine days. Was this shot already planned when you…

By Adam Nayman Pam: Speaking of, you see the bulge on that towel boy? Man, if I was you, I’d be in this spa 25/8. Cheryl: Yeah, but then I wouldn’t get to hang out with everybody at work. Pam: You hate everybody at work. Cheryl: I know. It’s the only thing that gets me…

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 Calum Marsh “This movie’s gonna be so good,” raves a zealous teenaged filmmaker to two young kids at the beginning of The Dirties. “It’s set in the club from Irreversible [2002].” The children are understandably baffled by the reference, and their reaction is genuine—they don’t know they’re acting in a film at all. The…