8 years ago
Retrospectives (10 posts found)
Anatomy of an artist
The Paul Thomas Anderson Retrospective
Though he's only made seven films, Paul Thomas Anderson has nonetheless made an indelible mark upon American cinema, evoking the likes of Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick, but able to form a voice all his own. This December, his latest film, Inherent Vice, hi...
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“Force Majeure” Director Ruben Östlund Examines the Perils of Groupthink: A Closer Look at the Swedish Director’s Filmography
Among the over 80 countries that have submitted films for the Oscars this year, Sweden's entry comes from a director unfamiliar to most North American cinephiles. Sweden has decided to submit Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure, but the film isn't Östlund's first to...
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The Claire Denis Retrospective
Claire Denis is a woman of few words, so I shall use that as an excuse to introduce this retrospective briefly. Though I have seen all of Denis' features now, it feels to me that we barely know each other, that the more we learn, the more we know we do not kno...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “The Wind Rises”
"The wind is rising! ... We must try to live!"
~Paul Valéry
The Wind Rises may be classified as a "biopic," but it is less a document of a man than it is of a dream: beginning with its birth, progressing through its lifespan, and then finally waving a tearfu...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “From Up On Poppy Hill”
As we've already established, Goro Miyazaki's Tales From Earthsea was Studio Ghibli's first disaster. Despite making lots of money at the Japanese box office, it also had the much more affecting consequence of being their first critically reviled film. Having ...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “The Secret World of Arrietty”
It's strange how much of a difference an English dub can make. That's how I watched The Secret World of Arietty when I first saw it two years ago, and I found it to be one of the Studio's lesser entries. Having watched it a second time for this piece, in its o...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Ponyo”
At this point in the retrospective, Studio Ghibli has been somewhat capitalizing on its international success by choosing distinctly western fictions to adapt, their last two films Howl's Moving Castle and Tales From Earthsea being adaptations of distinctly Br...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Tales From Earthsea”
As has already been documented on the Retrospective, I wasn't as big a fan of Isao Takahata's Pom Poko or Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns as many others were; but neither of them were explicitly "bad" movies. While I wasn't particularly amused by Pom Poko's ...
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The Lars von Trier Retrospective
There are very few provocateurs in the film biz these days, and of the ones that do exist, hardly any hold a candle to Lars von Trier's consistently shocking, daring, extraordinary filmography. Originally one of the founders of the Dogme-95 movement of avant-g...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Howl’s Moving Castle”
Throughout this retrospective, I've talked at length about Miyazaki's visual and thematic fascination with flight. But I haven't talked as much of another somewhat consistent image in the famed animators' work: castles. We certainly have obvious choices like t...
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