Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Postman’s White Nights, Peter Strickland on The Duke of Burgundy and more...

By Mark Peranson Like being sloppily slapped by a wet salmon to the point of submission, such is the impact of Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s inventive, audacious, and outright hilarious tour de force whatzit. Sure to ride roughshod over numerous territories following its premieres in Sundance and the Berlinale Forum, The Forbidden Room takes…

By Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman To be upfront, we weren’t familiar with Kidlat Tahimik. Multiple tips led us to seeing his new film, Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III, at its premiere in the Forum section of the Berlinale, in the way that one is often pushed towards unknown filmmakers: on the recommendations…

By Andrew Tracy There’s a line very early on in Jonathan Rayner’s recent monograph The Cinema of Michael Mann: Vice and Vindication that stands in marked contrast to the staid though commendably solid study that follows. Comparing Mann’s oeuvre to the framework of genre revisionism that characterized much of the ’70s “New Hollywood” American cinema,…

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 Max Nelson Derek Jarman’s quarrel with Thatcherism derived from all the causes one would expect—and some, perhaps, that one wouldn’t. Reading and watching the artist’s varied critiques of the Conservative prime ministry that ruled Britain for much of his working life reveals that there were always several Jarmans living in improbable harmony with each…

  By Shelly Kraicer Over the last six years, Luo Li has established himself as one of the most interesting young Canadian directors on the international festival circuit, and one of the most promising Chinese independent directors to emerge in the last decade. Marked by narrative playfulness, implicitly subversive formal innovation, and elegant, beautifully crafted…

By Phil Coldiron When viewed from within the bounds of the traditional, psychologically involved viewer, Entertainment, Rick Alverson’s second mature feature following The Comedy (2012), plays as the darkly comic passion of a man circling the drain leading down from one symbolic scene of death to another; an unpleasant journey, but still, a journey. It…

By Mark Peranson The Cinema Scope Top Ten of 2014 1. Horse Money (Pedro Costa) 2. Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard) 3. P’tit Quinquin (Bruno Dumont) 4. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso) 5. Phoenix (Christian Petzold) 6. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson) 7. The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid) 8. Maidan (Sergei Loznitsa) 9. Journey to the West…

  By Blake Williams Sundance regulars were generally in agreement that this was a solid year, but not as good as the last. This was my first venture to Park City, but having caught up with nearly all of 2014’s greatest hits, I have to dutifully disagree. In fact, against all odds, with over a…

By Chuck Stephens Puce is the color of a flea, literally. “Pooce” is how Kenneth Anger sometimes pronounces the word puce, a franconym denoting the grayish-purple color that is said to have been Marie Antoinette’s favourite shade. Puce, moreover—et merci Wikipedia—“is said to be the color of the bloodstains remaining on linen or bed sheets,…

By Jason Anderson Understandably reluctant to give a more specific appellation to the ever-morphing threat that imperils the teenage characters in his insidiously unnerving thriller It Follows, David Robert Mitchell tends to stick with “the It” in interviews. Given his second feature’s wealth of John Carpenter references, however—a heritage it shares with Adam Wingard’s The…

By Samuel La France Given its spoiler-heavy advertising and the considerable word of mouth following its screenings at Cannes and Sundance and numerous festivals in between, few will see Kornél Mundruczó’s White God without advance knowledge of its climactic set piece of hundreds of dogs running riot through the streets of Budapest. It’s hardly surprising…

By Quintín In a way, Wild Tales is an important film: at the time of writing, it’s about to sell its four millionth ticket in Argentina, and has also made the last round of nominations for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, after debuting last year in the Cannes competition. Only one other…