This the full table of contents from Cinema Scope Magazine #67. 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.  FEATURES *El Filibustero: Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful…

By Celluloid Liberation Front.  “Black is not a colour, it’s an attitude.” —James Baldwin Heavyweight champion in the fight for racial equality and social justice, poet, rhapsodic loudmouth, adorable smart-ass, magician, wisecracker extraordinaire, Muhammad Ali, né Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., had survived his own death long before dying. No screen, big or small, will ever…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum. J.P. Sniadecki’s feature-length The Iron Ministry (2014), available on DVD from Icarus Films, is by far the best non-Chinese documentary I’ve seen about contemporary mainland China. (Just for the record, the best Chinese documentary on the same general subject that I’ve seen is Yu-Shen Su’s far more unorthodox—and woefully still unavailable—Man Made…

By Blake Williams With birds singing above, a 71-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud sits dressed as the 76-year-old Sun King, pale and powdered under his big wig, nobly stationed amid a twilit rose garden in his wheelchair, finally bidding to his two eager valets: “Onward.” Thus begins Albert Serra’s fifth and most classically beautiful feature, La mort…

By Robert Koehler The Year of Trump now has its movie. In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature Aquarius, a property developer tries to force the last resident to move out of an old but hardly decrepit apartment building on a prime beachside lot. The tenant is Clara (Sonia Braga), a respected 65-year-old music critic and…

By Jordan Cronk At the dawn of the decade, a brief break appeared in the first wave of New Romanian Cinema. Though of similar historic and cinematic concern, a number of the films produced during this period—including Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Second Game (2013), Cristi Puiu’s Three Interpretation Exercises (2012), and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu…

By Mark Peranson Cinema Scope: Everyone Else premiered in Berlin in 2009, and now seven years later your third film is finally receiving its debut in Cannes. What took so long? Maren Ade: Directly after Everyone Else, I started working as a producer. I have a company called Komplitzen Film with Janine Jackowski and Jonas…

By Mark Peranson “Messieurs, nous ferons mieux la prochaine fois.”—Fagon, Le mort de Louis XIV The already established conventional wisdom is that 2016 saw a strong Cannes Competition ruined by a set of awful awards from a dunderheaded jury of circus clowns led by third-time’s-a-charm George Miller—and while I certainly agree with the latter contention,…

By Benny Safdie When you become obsessed with creating realism you create something fake. When you become obsessed with recreating reality you can create something hilarious. This idea hit me hard while watching the “Smokers Allowed” episode of Nathan Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan for You. For the uninitiated, Nathan for You plays like a…

By Adam Nayman “Better Call Saul is the shit and looks like—wait for it—digital Pedro Costa.” —@bmrow, April 17, 2016 Twitter isn’t always right, but when it is, the results can be illuminating. It might seem odd to begin an appreciation of AMC’s Better Caul Saul by talking about lighting; in the great mainstream moving-images…

By Michael Sicinski Certain filmmakers tend to be reduced to memes. Hong Sangsoo, for example, makes the same film over and over again. The late Manoel de Oliveira made stodgy, “old man” films. Guy Maddin is a pastiche artist, Michael Haneke is a scold, Spike Lee lacks discipline, and Lars von Trier is a stunted…

By Chuck Stephens “Could be that all those venal mother-fuckers are us…if so let’s go easy on them.” A funk-art, found-footage, intellectual brain-bait stoner comedy, epistemological jape, and audience-pleasing masterpiece of the American experimental cinema made in 1970, Robert Nelson’s Bleu Shut (30 Minutes) is exactly 30 minutes long. Hence the film’s full title, and…

  By Andrew Tracy A friend recently pigeonholed me after he witnessed an onstage film critics panel and demanded I make amends for wasting his time—not because I had in any way obliged him to attend, but simply because I was guilty by association. “What’s the point of critics talking about criticism?” he demanded, which…

By Andréa Picard “I don’t really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are. For example, if people wish I would sound like I used to sound, then it says more about them than it does me.”—Prince It’s a hit! Released in a whopping 300…

By Jay Kuehner A Sufi western? In the parole of Cannes’ critical taxonomy, the designation bestowed upon Oliver Laxe’s desert-fevered, Semaine de la Critique-winning allegory would seem reductive if it didn’t allude, paradoxically, to the film’s radically expansive nature. This leads one to wonder just what “a Sufi western” might look like, or how it…

By Mark Peranson Forestalling the inevitable but for a paragraph, one development that might strike some regular readers as being unique to this issue is a detour into the world of television criticism. But let me say that a kind of a mini TV focus that appears here is mainly a factor of coincidence—both in…

By Alicia Fletcher. “Mansfield Park? You’ve got to be kidding! That’s a notoriously bad book,” asserts Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), moments before memorably declaring that he never reads novels, favouring “good literary criticism” instead (though he later relents by confessing to a mild enjoyment of Persuasion). That onscreen disparagement aside,…