Cinema Scope

Canadians don’t do sequels. Or at least we don’t do them that often: Don Shebib went Down the Road Again again in 2011, and Bruce McDonald got the band back together for Hard Core Logo 2 (2010); commercially oriented hits like Fubar (2002) and Bon Co

Barbara Loden re-emerges in fragments. Caught in a 1965 snapshot from street photographer Garry Winogrand, she cuts across a wedge of city sunlight; tufts of windblown hair halo her wary face as one high heel steps just out of frame. Elusive, she fas

Since her passing in 1999, the Scottish poet, filmmaker, and visual artist Margaret Tait has become more visible and celebrated than she ever was in her lifetime, her modesty and reticence now replaced by the zeal of the many academics, curators, and

Rare these days is the filmmaker who proclaims that cinema is firstly a medium of ideas rather than of images and sounds, and few have made the case as strongly as James N. Kienitz Wilkins. For the better part of the past decade, the 35-year-old New

It’s outrageous that it should have taken this long for Angela Schanelec to make it into the Competition of the Berlinale—and ironic, given that it was a review of her film Passing Summer (2001), published in Die Zeit, that originated the term “Berli

In January of this year, Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Hanagatami surfaced on the streaming service MUBI, a year after its Rotterdam premiere and over four decades after the director’s debut feature Hausu (1977) hit Japanese cinemas. Such distribution details

When I was in college in Sarasota, Florida, a group of six artists called the Performers Workshop Ensemble came through my school for a week-long residency. They were involved in poetry, theatre, and particularly in new music composition. I discovere

It’s one of the most cunning ironies in Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam (2018) that just beyond the edges of the screen that dominates the protagonist’s existence is… another frame. It’s one of those chintzy, gilded affairs that an earlier gene

Writing in Millennium Film Journal in 2014, cultural critic Ara Osterweil proposed that American artist James Turrell’s careerlong Light and Space project is not only kindred with experimental film, but could rescue the cinema from mounting fears of

From A to B and Back Again. Given that “A” is “Andy,” what might count as a suitable “B”? In the context of the book of Warhol’s “philosophy” bearing that subtitle, it was literal: the Factory superstar Brigid Berlin and Interview magazine editor Bob

Nicknamed the “dark-faced god” of Hong Kong filmmaking for his tantrum-throwing intensity and restrictive regime on set, Ringo Lam has proven mortal after all. One of the greatest directors of car chases, conflicted characters, and society coming apa

“There is something in borders and frontiers that magnetically draws me to them, while of course the utopia of a world in which these absurd divisions don’t exist is always on my mind,” pondered Jocelyne Saab in one of her last films, Imaginary Postc

Sundance, measured by the sheer volume of movies premiered and bought and sent into the global distribution pipeline, is the most powerful film festival in the US and now a close second in North America to TIFF. A festival with that kind of power isn

I had been living in Berlin for a year when, in 2012, I received an email with the subject line, “bigtime.” The email read, “Since you mentioned Die Halbstarken you should really watch this documentary that was filmed a year after the Wall came down,

In 2014, the Chinese government first outlined its plans for a “social credit system,” a massive project that utilizes various data-collection tools to rank the good standing of the country’s citizens, set to be fully implemented by 2020. Undertaken

Frank Beauvais’ first feature Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle opens with a title card stating that the film we’re about to see is solely comprised of clips from over 400 movies that the 49-year-old French filmmaker watched between April and Octobe

The outrage that (rightfully) greeted the Cinémathèque française’s 2017 retrospective dedicated to director Dorothy Arzner laid bare the doublethink that continues to haunt our attempts to properly celebrate women filmmakers. In film notes and a cura

To appreciate the historical scope and layered references of Denis Côté’s Répertoire des villes disparues, we would do well to begin before the film does, at a time when some of the apparitions that haunt Irénée-les-Neiges, the film’s fictional north

Few documentarians have made a more visceral case against humanity’s virus-like incursion into the planet as has Jennifer Baichwal. The Canadian nonfiction filmmaker has long been a large-scale image-maker in a country with a decidedly humbler realis

Following on the heels of his two biggest-budget films to date, High-Rise (2015) and Free Fire (2016), Ben Wheatley has made something of a homecoming with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, which is appropriate considering that the film centres on a fa

Grain or rain? A grey, acid shower is pelting down onscreen; perhaps several layers or overlain lattices of pelt. It looks a bit like the rain in Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926), bright and brittle against black night, but what exactly it is that