A man lathers himself with shaving cream, then looks into his mirror.
A tour group passes behind a kitchen furniture setup. The guide says, “And here we have two dining room chairs and a table.”
The film’s rendering of period sets and costumes with cruddy camerawork makes us aware that the film is a limited dramatic representation of real life.
The film’s main problem isn’t that it spins standard horror-as-politics metaphors, but rather that it exploits real violence in order to advance them.
Film is a phantom, but a living one.
Julie Taymor’s film isn’t as disastrous as it could have been, though it does fundamentally fail Shakespeare’s play.
Souvenir, Souvenir, with its sharp, rapid edits between faces and bursts of sudden color, delights in dissolving people over animals and vice versa.
A film like Certified Copy explodes truisms about acting.
While No End in Sight’s subjects speak truth to power, Inside Job demonstrates how the people in power are still lying.
The film seems useful primarily as an illustration of the beliefs that Godard’s 90-plus films have collectively expressed.
It’s official, say critics: Hong Sang-soo’s repeating himself.
Sergei Loznitsa seems to be trying to attack everyone and everything it can look at, which proves too much for one film.
The gift my parents’ breakup gave me was that it made me a moviegoer.
Silent Souls is a ghost story, with flashbacks literally bringing the dead back to life.
It’s tiring when filmmakers claim that their work is anti-psychological, and then use technique as a smokescreen for dubious racial, sexual, and political views.
Just as Fincher’s films process the world through computers, we process our world through computer screens too.
Nagisa Oshima in the ’60s can be classed as a nihilist, his films angrily obliterating nearly everything in sight.
The film respects the monks’ position, and the formal choices reflect that respect.
Even though the movies are alive and well, film itself is turning ghostly.
In the film, characters keep finding new forms, shapes, and alignments to interact with each other in nature.