This the full table of contents from Cinema Scope Magazine #70. 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. 

By Andrew Tracy  Silence is Martin Scorsese’s best film in 20 years—since Kundun (1997), in fact, which also happens to be the last of his films to focus primarily on matters spiritual. In claiming this, I have no desire to put forth a return-to-form narrative to counter that of the Scorsese acolytes, for whom the…

  By Chuck Stephens  Shreveport, Louisiana-born experimental filmmaker Will Hindle (1929–1987) did two tours in the Army during the ’50s, and worked as a cartoonist and editor for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes during both stints. In between those two tours, he worked briefly for Walt Disney Studios, the youngest animator they had on…

  By Jonathan Rosenbaum  Probably the most important DVD release of last year, inexplicably overlooked by me when I made out my lists for Sight and Sound and DVD Beaver, is Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (1925) and The Case of Lena Smith (fragment, 1929) on a single all-region disc from www.edition-filmmuseum.com for 19.95…

By Adam Nayman  It’s all in the wrist. Buried beneath layers of latex as John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), the only part of John Hurt that is visibly untouched by disfiguring makeup is his left arm, which the actor wields with the precision and grace of a sabre. It’s both an…

Arriving like a breath of fresh air five days into the 67th Berlinale, Thomas Arslan’s Bright Nights salvaged what was by all accounts was another typically lacklustre Competition lineup.

By Jay Kuehner  At a Q&A after a well-received screening of Eliza Hittman’s film Beach Rats, which earned her the Directing Award in the US Dramatic competition, the Cal Arts grad spoke of the aesthetic need to “de-emphasize story”—an admission that, in the context of Sundance’s high priority for narrative takeaways, might well have constituted…

By Blake Williams  “All the things she does, written in her diary But when the day is done, she cannot tell the truth” — Talulah Gosh, in “Talulah Gosh” In the pages leading up to Roland Barthes’ generous, accurate, and still vital conception of our relationship to photographic images in Camera Lucida, he devotes a…

By Sean Rogers  “He knows how to pace a story. He isn’t a great novelist. He’s a craftsman, but every once in a while it’s nice to read something long without boring us to death before we get to page 50.” —Roberto Bolaño on Thomas Harris’ Hannibal There’s a shootout at the end of Live…

By Shelly Kraicer  How can a filmmaker like Feng Xiaogang exist in China? His films somehow manage to be both widely popular and ideologically unconventional. For many years—until the onset of the current “wild east” phenomenon, in which a stream of record-breaking blockbusters seems regularly to be emerging from China’s hyped-up movie-production machine—Feng has consistently…

Once more by popular demand (and against my better wishes), the Cinema Scope writers and editors have spoken, and, as predicted—no fix was in, I swear—here we go on record with the year’s top ten, a.k.a. Toni and the Gang.

By Angelo Muredda  Early in Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs, we meet Marty, a recovering addict working as a social worker for drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park. A loquacious eccentric who clearly relishes the Aaron Sorkin-inflected walk-and-talk of his onscreen introduction, Marty seems equally comfortable leading a tutorial on packing safe injection kits at work…

By Robert Koehler  There are several ways to measure the greatness of Dane Komljen’s first feature work, All the Cities of the North, and one of them is simply asking people who’ve just seen it if they can compare it to anything else. I’ve played this little game with viewers, many asked randomly, after festival…

“This is a product of the Umbrella Corporation. Our business is life itself. Some side effects may occur.” —commercial announcement lead-in to the end credits of Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

By Michael Sicinski  The first thing you should know about El Mar la mar is that it is not a production of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. The new film, which premiered in Berlin’s Forum and won the Caligari Prize, was made by SEL regular J.P. Sniadecki and Canadian-born, Ithaca, NY-based experimentalist Joshua Bonnetta. Yet…