By Andrew Tracy If “indie-ness” conveys a certain generic intimation unto itself, some of the most celebrated recent independent films have also strategically adopted broader generic tactics, usually related to violence. As sensation, whether shockingly enacted or tautly withheld, has started to become an ever more important element for independents to attract the necessary attention,…

By Jay Kuehner Consider it a triumph of the medium that soon we may not speak of “in-between-ness” or indeterminacy in cinema (let alone “slow” or “contemplative”), such attributes having become subsumed by and substantive of film itself, commonly deployed to a point of sufficiency. In which case a film such as Valérie Massadian’s Nana,…

By Andréa Picard “Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, directors, etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.” —Robert Bresson, Notes sur le Cinématographe “Art is like a fire; it is born out of…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum 1. IL CINEMA RITROVATO DVD AWARDS 2011 Jurors: Lorenzo Codelli, Alexander Horwath, Mark McElhatten, Paolo Mereghetti, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Peter von Bagh. BEST DVD 2010 / 2011 Segundo de Chomón 1903-1912: El Cine de La Fantasia. (Filmoteca de Catalunya [ICIC]/Cameo Media s.l.) A production by Cameo and Filmoteca Catalunya. The first edition of…

By Robert Koehler The lure of islands, their fundamental thereness, their separation from, and fragile connections to, the rest of civilization, their existence as an ideal metonym for individual identity but also for the world as a whole—all these, and more, make islands powerful places for filmmakers to land upon. When they do, they’re hopefully…

By Olivier Père It’s been a long time since a first feature has displayed such masterly direction as Nadav Lapid’s Policeman (Hashoter), such a sense of connection to the films of Godard, Bresson, Fassbinder, Kubrick, and Haneke, and giving those more perceptive viewers such a conviction of witnessing the arrival of an outstanding filmmaker while…

By Mark Peranson Over the last decade, I’ve realized that Frederick Wiseman devotees are incapable of critical thinking when it comes to their master. They fail to see (or refuse to acknowledge) that in composing his career-long grand narrative analysis, Wiseman sometimes loses sight of the particularities of the institution under observation; at times, he’s…

By Richard Porton The title of Russell Jacoby’s 1983 polemic, The Repression of Psychoanalysis, suggests that the radical implications of the Freudian tradition have become muddled in an era where nothing seems more safely middle-class than a session on the couch with the shrink of one’s choice. In evoking a juncture at the turn of…

By Gabe Klinger “We lived by night, shooting and editing our bigger than life experiences in a lonely place on dangerous ground.” —Tom Farrell “Bless the family that loves together…Bless the family that laughs and cries together… Together…”—“Bless the Family” by Norm Zamcheck, written for We Can’t Go Home Again Nicholas Ray, eternal auteurist pet…

By Thom Andersen 1. The Clock is certainly dumb: a 24-hour movie made entirely from other movies in which the depicted screen time corresponds precisely to the actual time of the screening with plenty of clock inserts and shots in which clocks appear, sometimes incidentally. I’m sure I’m not the first to ask, why didn’t…

By Michael Sicinski One could make a long, sad list of everything wrong with American independent cinema today, but one of the worst things about so much of it is just how desperate it is to be liked. There’s an ugly tendency to simultaneously flatter an audience’s supposed good taste and breeding (“look at you,…

By Robert Koehler “Hey, do you wanna see somethin’?”—Driver in Drive In the middle of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a film punctuated by extreme flourishes of violence and vengeance, there is a period of peace. It occurs when Driver (Ryan Gosling), a quietly contained guy who holds down three jobs—auto mechanic, movie stunt driver, and…