This is the complete list of articles from magazine issue of Cinema Scope #58. We post selected articles from each issue on the site. For the complete content please subscribe to the magazine, or consider the instant digital download version. Features What is Boyhood? by Gabe Klinger Hardbodies and Soul: The Professional Wrestler as Actor by Adam Nayman Game…

By Mark Peranson The Cinema Scope Top Ten of 2013 1. L’inconnu du lac (Alain Guiraudie) 2. Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz) 3. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke) 4. What Now? Remind Me (Joaquim Pinto) 5. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher) 6. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang) 7. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel…

By Blake Williams In their attempt to adapt of one of those ornery “unfilmable” novels to the big screen, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze transformed Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a meta-satire on film adaptations called, appropriately, Adaptation (2002). Following a short prologue in which Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is shown being shooed…

By Julian Carrington. “Let’s make an agreement,” declares Anjelica Huston’s estranged matriarch to her trio of wayward sons in the penultimate scene of The Darjeeling Limited (2007): “We’ll stop feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s not very attractive.” Following the downbeat double-header of Darjeeling and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)—which had seen cinema’s most…

By Calum Marsh Dissonance was in the air in the Rotterdam. There persists, of course, a contradiction at the heart of every international film festival: thousands are asked to converge together in a city so that they may spend their time alone in the dark, which is a bit like wasting a tropical vacation watching…

By Shelly Kraicer There are aspects of present-day Chinese reality so bizarre that only surrealist-tinged genre films can come close to capturing them. In the press kit for the brilliant noir-mystery-arthouse mash-up Black Coal, Thin Ice, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin, director Diao Yinan observes, “There’s a lot going on in China these…

By Robert Koehler Amongst the certainties of every large festival, three are more certain than the others. One, every large festival shows many bad movies. Second, no two people (unless they’re attached at the hip) see remotely similar lineups of movies and can’t see enough of them to get the truly big picture on the…

By Chuck Stephens To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language… —Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant, 1811 A buzzsaw in turbulent neon; a heartbeat and a hummingbird; a flickering flame mistaken for a cosmic streetwalker by a god/man with the clammy, impassive stare of a…

By Andréa Picard When Heidegger assigned the virtue of truth to works of art, he did so while heeding to his own tastes as any aesthete would. The origin of a work of art, he opined, is where said authenticity lies. Determining provenance is thus imperative to understanding the essence of an artwork, which significantly…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum There’s no question that DVDs and Blu-rays are fostering new viewing habits and also new critical protocols and processes in sizing up what we’re watching. A perfect example of what I mean is Criterion’s brilliant idea to release Kurosawa Akira’s Throne of Blood (1957) with two alternative sets of subtitles by Linda…

By Max Goldberg “The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth”—Frank O’Hara Perhaps the only rule of Stephanie Barber’s otherwise unruly art is that words not be taken for granted. “There’s a certain faith that people put in language,” reflects one of the characters in DAREDEVILS, and Barber makes…

By Max Nelson Six minutes into Nainsukh (2010), Amit Dutta’s dreamy, intoxicating tribute to the life and work of the brilliant 18th-century Indian miniaturist painter, two worlds collide. As Nainsukh and his father, also a painter, sit bent over their work in an open-air second-storey studio, the camera’s attention begins to wander, settling first on…

By Quintín 3D, a charming little comedy/documentary by Rosendo Rui, recently had its international premiere in Rotterdam, and the film itself transpires at another film festival: the 2013 edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de Cosquín (FICIC), held at the Cosquín resort in the Argentine province of Córdoba. Loosely centred around a love…

By Michael Sicinski “Medium talent!” —Bill Murray, to Chevy Chase at the end of their 1977 fistfight, backstage at Saturday Night Live 1. Not unlike such melodramatic European specialties as the Transavantguardia and Robbie Williams, Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino makes a lot more sense in the moment than he does in immediate retrospect, and it…

By Jordan Cronk Since reaching its height of visibility following the release of the Palme d’Or winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), the Romanian New Wave has charted an oblique, fascinating course away from the spotlight. The rising tide of interest prompted not only by Cristian Mungiu’s breakthrough abortion drama but also…

By Adam Nayman Wrapping up the Toronto International Film Festival in Film Comment last fall, editor Gavin Smith praised Philomena and confused the Yucatan for the Philippines before bestowing his seal of approval on Oculus, a mildly effective American horror movie by Mike Flanagan about a haunted mirror. Notwithstanding Smith’s assertion that it features “the…

By Gabe Klinger Shot from 2002 to 2013, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood charts a dozen years in the life of a family: Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke). Related mainly from Mason Jr.’s point of view as he and the actor who plays him ages from six…