This the full table of contents from Cinema Scope Magazine #65. We post selected articles from each issue on the site which you can read for free using the links below. This is only possible with support from our subscribers, so please consider a subscription to the magazine, or  the instant digital download version.  Interviews Two Years at Sea: An Interview…

  By Angelo Muredda Another awards-season thoroughbred is foaled in Room, Lenny Abrahamson’s take on Ireland-born, Canada-based Booker Prize nominee Emma Donoghue’s best-seller. For all its touchy subject matter, Room is the sort of film for which People’s Choice awards were made: a lightly conceptual, sturdily acted piece of redemptive cinema that peers into the…

By Phil Coldiron It is a question of pleasure after all… Reporting from Cannes, Daniel Kasman concluded his dispatch for Mubi’s Notebook on Carol with an apparently simple question, one to which he admitted he was unable to find a satisfactory answer: “So what is at stake here?” To be certain, the stakes of Todd…

  By Chuck Stephens “By cutting across so many jungles, the archetype of adventure came out crazed and beating his chest. I barely understand him.” Legendary Los Angeles filmmaker Peter Mays is talking about his gorilla. His gorilla is dead, and has been a number of times now—dead on its various arrivals. Originally signed and…

By Mark Peranson Not to toot one’s own horn, but merely to point out a fact that might have flashed by or eluded many: again this year over at www.cinema-scope.com (where, truth be told, you are likely reading this), we endeavoured to provide, at great effort and comparatively large expense, a wide-ranging survey of the…

By Michael Sicinski It’s a strange film that calls to mind both Out 1 (1971) and Sex and the City. But Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Happy Hour is defined by that odd tug between spacious, undirected improvisation on the one hand, and an incident-driven examination of the ups and downs of four women friends on the other.…

By Shelly Kraicer The protagonist of Kaili Blues, Chen Sheng, is a small-town medical practitioner and ex-con. He bought his practice in Kaili, in southwestern China’s Guizhou province, with a small inheritance after his mother died while he was in jail. He’s not exactly a doctor; he’s more of a dreamer, a poet, and a…

By Blake Williams Back in 2006, Marco Bellocchio sent the Rome Film Festival a project called Sorelle, a curious 68-minute whatsit he shot over a six-year period with a MiniDV camcorder. He made it in collaboration with several film-school students in Bobbio (Bellocchio’s hometown), but, with a cast that includes his son (Pier Giorgio), daughter…

By Samuel La France It’s an irony surely not lost on Athina Rachel Tsangari that her Chevalier won the “Best Film” prize at the London Film Festival, considering that its story is built upon an obsessive quest to attain an even greater superlative. But even though the film finds six mostly well-off, middle-aged-and-up males pursuing…

By Christoph Huber “I see myself, in the years ahead, directing or producing or both. I see myself developing new talent, which would be furiously interesting for me. For I love talent. Love to watch it. Love to help it. Am more genuinely interested in the talent of others than I am in my own.”…

By Jordan Cronk In his February 1963 essay “Towards a New Narrative Film Form,” Gregory J. Markopoulos proposed a radical conception of audio-visual harmony to be achieved via dissociative editing and “integrated frame adjacencies,” which together would accelerate the classic montage style while defusing its horizontal progression. This technique would first be realized in Markopoulos’…

By Jason Anderson Alan Zweig’s Hurt is steeped in failures, not all of them belonging to the film’s unholy trainwreck of a subject, Steve Fonyo. In 1984, four years after a similarly valiant effort by Terry Fox that won the hearts and minds of the nation, the 18-year-old cancer survivor from Vernon, B.C. began a…

By José Teodoro Neon Bull begins with a languid lateral pan across widescreen-friendly corral fencing, bulls lazing one atop another spied between the slats. This image is soon followed by that of a plane of parched mud littered with coloured rags and dismembered mannequins. Later we see a woman waxing her pubic hair in the…

By Jay Kuehner A post-industrial trance film set aboard a phantom-like freighter drifting toward shipwreck or oblivion, Dead Slow Ahead materializes its eponymous nautical telegraph into an abstract state of voluptuous inertia. The merchant ship Fair Lady is adrift in unspecified international waters, her crew diminished (if not devoured) by the machinery of the vessel…

  By Kate Rennebohm “I was overcome by an emotion I can’t quite define…but it was very, very strong, and had something to do with happiness. [And after seeing more of her work,] there really have been moments during which I felt I had to defend myself against what was being expressed, moments in the…