As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on lives and societies around the world, the likes of which we have never seen (except in a disaster movie or dystopian fiction), we wanted to investigate further the impact...
In 2016 I was conducting research for an article about a forgotten experimental montage film that Jean-Luc Godard had created and screened at the Rott...
Spécial Cinéma
Spécial Cinéma was a weekly programme on Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR, public broadcaster in French-speaking Switzerland). First bro...
Can a “feel-good” mainstream film ever be considered a great film? I think it can, but I don’t think Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019) quit...
Early shots of Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House (2019) tell a grim story. It’s dark. Headlights make a cemetery almost visible through a rained-on w...
Since the clerico-authoritarian regime, often referred to as ‘Austrofascism’ (1933–38), which arose through Chancellor Dollfuss and his Fatherland Fro...
Under the current restrictions of lockdown and quarantine, in which we are being asked not to leave our homes, “hands-on filmmaking” has become virtua...
Windows or Doors: Doors and Windows
John Szarkowski’s 1978 show (and book) Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 explored the movement...
There are those who write music for the movies, and then there are those whose music reshapes the stuff of cinema. Ennio Morricone, who died in July t...
Some filmmakers make their mark with a searing unity of vision. Film after film, they impose their inner landscapes or, perhaps, their unique way of s...
Thomas Elsaesser, a truly titanic figure in film studies, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 76 on December 4, 2019, while on a teaching assignmen...
The prolific Canadian director Denis Côté has a new film out, entitled (in English; see below for more on this) Ghost Town Anthology (2019), which has...
For the third time in a row, the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) went to a newcomer from China. This year, it was best...
The label of “auteur cinema”, whether poetic or political, is often the cloak under which African cinema is “discovered” and appreciated. We know the ...
Cinema is one of those rare forms of art where the relation and tension between aesthetics and ideology, past and present, and formalism and realism, ...
For all the festivals forced to cancel their yearly rendezvous in response to the COVID pandemic, there’s a tiny contingent that have blossomed under ...
There are very good books and articles on actors, about stardom, about performance, on acting and about acting. David Thomson and Pauline Kael have of...
In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a cas...
Steven Ungar’s Critical Mass groups together and examines three-and-a-half decades worth of non-fiction filmmaking in France, making a compelling case...
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ Masks in Horror Cinema does not begin like a horror film, at least not in the sense of an attention-grabbing opening scene ...
In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addict...
Writing about Les Enfants Terribles in mid-2020 during a global pandemic, it is tempting to draw parallels between the seclusion of real-world citizen...
In August of 1963, two months before his death, Jean Cocteau recorded on film a “speech to the year 2000” in which he mused on his creative process. H...
Jakubisko is kin to Brazil's Glauber Rocha, America's Robert Downey, Mexico's Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of...
From its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, it was clear how deeply Through the Olive Trees was embedded in the past. It was the thi...
“It’s a film about homework.”
Or so Abbas Kiarostami tells a group of schoolboys who approach him on the street and ask what he’s filming. “Have you ...
Kahne-ye doust kodjast? (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987), is the first of three interrelated films in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy”, named af...
“Forever and ever (and ever)” since its release, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has generated an uncanny amount of literature, by critics and fa...
Much like Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho (1960), Stanley Kubrick sought, with The Shining (1980), to conduct an experiment in cinematic fear. While neit...
Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a film about isolation and the threat of an invisible evil. It relates to our current situation insofar as now, in spr...
In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson famously takes the Westin Bonaventure Hotel as an emblem of postmodern im...
It is a common trope that authors rarely like films based on their novels. Stephen King, who at the time of this writing has seen 48 feature films and...
The end of The Shining will always be enigmatic. In the movie’s final scene we see a photograph taken at the Overlook Hotel on July 4, 1921. It shows ...
If, as I have argued elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick is an intellectual, Jewish, and “Talmudic” filmmaker, his text most susceptible to Jewish or Talmudic ...
Through the character of Danny Torrance, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining influenced a new model of uncanny child character that has become a key trope o...
A number of recurring motifs, themes and ‘signature’ styles have been attributed to Stanley Kubrick over the years, mostly from an auteurist perspecti...
In The Shining no attention is drawn to it and it appears open, such that the page layouts are recognisable, only three times. This is perhaps why up ...
Much has been written about the intertextual richness of Stanley Kubrick’s cinema both in and of itself and in terms of its influence on other filmmak...
Four decades is a short time in the grand scheme of all history, but in the realm of film music, it is a significant span. It is time enough to see ov...
The Shining is a resource that keeps on giving. It has generated a whole “universe” of creative, critical and fan activity. Stanley Kubrick adapted Th...
For a film about the afterlife, The Shining has had an unusual afterlife of its own. Forty years after its initial release, the imagery of Kubrick’s o...
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has gained notoriety not only for the sheer quantity of critical analysis it has produced, a voluminous outpourin...
The Shining is a glaring example of a film that has led to countless interpretations, favoured by its complex and enigmatic nature, sometimes leading ...
Since its theatrical release in 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has fit uneasily into the horror genre and has met with a discordant range of resp...
Featuring a brand new, original video essay by Miguel Mira and Olena Pikho, made especially for this dossier, this is the opportunity to look at a ser...
The current pandemic has not only prompted revived interest in viral dystopian films, but also inflects the way we engage with even the most mundane f...
“A repetition of identical days, the only variant of which is the cinephile menu”. – Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Just Don't Think I'll Scream,...
Like most people, the pandemic has meant I spend more time online. I’ve found Twitter to be a great resource: the feeds of many writers and cinephiles...
While it’s impossible to say when film theatres will reopen, on the bright side, it has been both exciting and humbling to be involved in the rapid ev...
Morning is a stray thread from which the rest of the day unravels. Before Covid-19 social isolation began, I prevented this reckless unravelling by le...
Occasionally throughout isolation, I’ve experienced that moment when two seemingly disparate films ‘talk’ to each other. Recently, I watched Midsommar...
Reading the surfeit of post-COVID commentary written over the past few months, a common refrain emerges: even when the coronavirus pandemic is brought...
Reading Tara Judah’s latest dispatch for Ubiquarian I was struck by this line: “what happens to the world when it is at our fingertips and eyeballs bu...
During this strange period of lockdown, I’ve divided my time between writing, reading, exercise, goofy time with my wife, following the daily news Hor...
It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least. I’ve spent most of my time making movies, rather than watching them, as you can see here, and p...
