The movie offers two forms of magic, since its conquest of the visible world extends in two opposite directions. The first, on which the realist theory concentrates, gives it the power to 'possess' the real world by capturing its appearance. The second, focus of the traditional aesthetic, permits the presentation of an ideal image, ordered … Continue reading #73. Cléo from 5 to 7, and #74. Vagabond. Dir., Agnes Varda
Bresson's style is not everyone's cup of tea, but a film like Au Hasard Balthazar is a quick path to understanding the depth of cinema's potential as an art form. Typically a film, even a really good one, is an industrial composite, a product from a system that is not always about putting the best … Continue reading #297. Au Hasard Balthazar. Dir., Robert Bresson
In the middle of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing there is a quick cultural reference that is easy to miss, or at least misinterpret as simply a joke. Da Mayor, an elderly drunk in the neighborhood, stops a boy on the street and asks, "What makes Sammy run?" The boy replies, "My name is … Continue reading #97. Do The Right Thing. Dir., Spike Lee
The River has the power to reveal the extent to which other Western films about Southeast Asia will rely on Orientalist tropes about poverty, spirituality, and naturalism. Whether out of a fear of reproducing visual stereotypes or from a keen awareness that he has a lot to learn about India, Jean Renoir decided to adopt … Continue reading #276. The River. Dir., Jean Renoir
In the moment, many films with explicit politics can feel powerful. Impassioned character dialogue, visual imagery of resistance, or thematically-structured arguments will often strike the audience with the force of a heavyweight boxer. But afterward, the same audience stands and notices, more often than not, that none of the punches left even a mark. Nothing's … Continue reading #249. The Battle of Algiers. Dir., Gillo Pontecorvo
Let's begin with the ending of Visconti's The Leopard. Having attended a ball that went all night and into the early hours of the next morning, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, refuses a carriage ride back to his estate. He decided he would walk home alone. This ending is not the ending of … Continue reading #235. The Leopard. Dir., Luchino Visconti
As a visual medium, cinema has its own pathways for an audience to recognize the tragedy of a society forbidding the love between people. A film's script can make the tragedy explicit through the dialogue of approving or disapproving characters, but the visual nature of a film opens multiple opportunities for the couple to communicate … Continue reading #198. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Dir., Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rotten Tomatoes (RT) found a way to get every last drop from the well of convenience. Film criticism is already pressured, tacitly by convention, or explicitly by editors and bosses, to give bite-size scores with thumbs (up or down), stars (out of 4 or 5), letter grades (with memories of school report cards) or numbers … Continue reading What does the growing divide on Rotten Tomatoes mean?
Like other streaming services, Netflix does not make its user data public. To date, there are two exceptions to this privacy. Netflix released a large dataset of anonymized user activity when it offered a one million dollar prize for the best AI model that could predict user ratings with data between 1998 and 2005. Netflix … Continue reading The habits of Netflix’s users
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive … Continue reading #196. Hiroshima mon amour. Dir., Alain Resnais
notes on cinema 