8 years ago
Features (10 posts found)
Spotlight on Fandor: “The Deep Blue Sea”
Terence Davies’s films function so completely as works of personal memory that the director’s gift for vividly detailed period recreation turns history itself into mere context for a life lived. This is especially true of the autobiographical first phase of hi...
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Throwing Shade: An Erotic “Fifty Shades of Grey” Fan-Fiction
There’s nothing in this world that gets my blood pumping, that makes my breath shallow, that invigorates my inner goddess quite like trash cinema. I live for the garbage, and I’ve been looking forward to one upcoming release that would satisfy me in ways I nev...
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A Reel Boy: “Pinocchio” at 75
A solitary old man lives in an Italian village, spending his waking hours working on all manner of wooden creations, from cuckoo clocks to marionettes. He is awash in loneliness, maintaining relationships with his pet goldfish and cat, the latter of whom he no...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Ballast” and “Our Children”
It’s best to clarify upfront that neither of this week’s Fandor picks are, as we like to say back in England, “a barrel of laughs.” Rather, Lance Hammer’s Ballast and Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children are both somber, sensitive and grueling tales of extreme depre...
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Love Streams: 5 Criterions on Fandor
I spend more time picking a film to watch than I do actually watching them, but I feel like the folks at Fandor have finally created a solution for my predicament: give me an ultimatum. (And since it's almost Valentine's Day, I feel comfortable telling you tha...
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Outback Antonioni: “Picnic at Hanging Rock” at 40
“Only a million years ago,” a teacher says of the formation of the eponymous landmark of Picnic at Hanging Rock as she escorts schoolgirls there on a field trip. Like that mass of volcanic stone, Peter Weir’s 40-year-old film is relatively young, yet it presen...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” and “Memphis”
Existential crises have long proved fertile ground for compelling cinema, and two recent Sundance breakthroughs—Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of her Beauty and Tim Sutton’s Memphis—adopt refreshingly original approaches to illuminating the dilemmas of ...
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Time After TIme: Looking Back at “Before Sunrise”
When Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Jimmy Stewart, Stewart told a story about a random guy who once told him, "You did this thing in a movie where you read a poem once … That was good." Stewart realized that the guy was talking about a movie that came out in 19...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Tongues Untied”
However one interprets Kodak’s co-option of gay black dads Kordale Anthony and Kaleb Lewis for a recent advertising campaign, it’s nonetheless heartening to see open, honest depictions of black male homosexuality explored in a prominent space. This subject mat...
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Ranking the Films of Michael Mann
Michael Mann is largely known for directing crime thrillers, but a closer look at his body of work reveals a much wider range. Beginning with Thief in 1981, his output has included period pieces, biopics, and even a horror fantasy alongside epic stories of cop...
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