7 years ago
All posts by Jake Cole
“Junun” Is A Beautiful Tribute to Artistic Collaboration
Editor's note: We are thrilled to announce that MUBI, the curated online cinema that brings its members a hand-picked selection of the best independent, international, and classic films, is now sponsoring Movie Mezzanine. One of MUBI's current selections is Ju...
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“The Forbidden Room” Is A Freewheeling Achievement
Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room is a tribute to a film that never existed. More accurately, it is a supercut of various fictional films—a stitched-together collage of associative links and vague thematic consistency. From one point of view, th...
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Blu-ray Review: “Black Coal, Thin Ice”
Black Coal, Thin Ice is noir stripped so bare that its stark procedural lapses into the abstract, where bleached daytime shots create a purgatory that lapses into the hell of the night, where monochrome contrasts of black skies and icy streets are given a sini...
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NYFF Review: “Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton”
The most succinct summary of Guy Maddin’s latest short film, made in collaboration with Evan and Galen Johnson, comes from Toronto critic Adam Nayman, who declared, “there’s never been shade-throwing of this magnitude in the history of Canadian cinema.” The fi...
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The Divergent Career of Alex Ross Perry
Alex Ross Perry’s fourth film, the paranoid thriller Queen of Earth, marks a departure for the 31-year-old director, though in a sense he has been diverging from both his work and that of his peers from the start of his career. With its ambling photography and...
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Blu-ray Review: “The Hunger”
Tony Scott foregrounds the aesthetic context for his vampire-movie debut The Hunger before the first images roll. Over introductory credits comes the sound of goth outfit Bauhaus striking up their biggest hit, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” as the frame fades up on fron...
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DVD Review: “Run of the Arrow”
The problem with race as a subject in Hollywood is that the complexities of systemic oppression are fundamentally incompatible with the simplification necessary for narrative-driven filmmaking, where the priority of story resolution often results in laughably ...
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From The Ashes: The Collaboration of Director and Actress in “Phoenix”
Phoenix, Christian Petzold’s latest film, finds the German filmmaker working with many of his usual cast and crew, including cinematographer Hans Fromm and editor Bettina Böhler. The most significant of his recurring collaborations, however, is with star Nina ...
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On The Miraculous and Innovative “Horse Money”
Note. This review originally ran during our coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
Pedro Costa’s filmography can be seen not only as an unified body of work, but as something approaching a miracle. The incremental shifts in his working meth...
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“The Look of Silence” Is One of the Best Documentaries in Decades
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing found an idiosyncratic, formally daring means of exhuming the ghosts of the Indonesian anti-Communist purges of the 1950s and ‘60s, cajoling surviving war criminals into confessing their atrocities by getting the proud m...
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