Category: Foreign
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The troubled spirituality of Krzysztof Kieślowski
If there is one filmmaker that speaks to me on a spiritual level – who is able to connect with my thoughts, frustrations, passions and speak to my deepest fears and regrets – it is Krzysztof Kieślowski, who with his premature death in 1996 left an insurmountable void in the cinematic landscape. Kieślowski’s movies were…
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About Elly: How mundanity turns into a nightmare
Scary season is upon us, that time of the year when people enjoy being spooked by their favorite movies. Personally, this time around I decided to revisit a film that stopped me in my tracks after first viewing it. It gave me chills despite being a regular drama about regular people. Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly…
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The Passenger: Jack Nicholson and Michelangelo Antonioni have an identity crisis
Throughout the 70s and 80s, several Hollywood stars collaborated on projects with some of cinema’s biggest auteurs. Most notably, the likes of Robert De Niro – who, fresh off an Oscar win for Raging Bull, decided to fly out to Rome and work with Sergio Leone (who at that point hadn’t directed a movie in…
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Pain and Glory: How to Tell a Love Story in 5 Minutes
In today’s day and age, speed is what matters most. You don’t want to bore the viewer. You want to deliver him the most vital information in the shortest amount of time. You want him to experience feelings within a short time span. You want him to get the juice of the story before he…
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The 5 Best Movies of the Decade
2020 is almost here as we are nearing the end of a fantastic decade for cinema. The 2010s have featured a steady rise in the variety of material produced by the world of filmmakers and have offered to audiences some of the greatest cinematic moments we could ever experience. The growth of this medium is…
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One Man’s Sins
As the news reports keep popping up on our phones, tablets and TV screens, we can’t help but wonder: “What if something really bad happens? What then? What will the world look like? Will we be the same as now?” Most of the time the answer is ‘NO’, and film has been known as a…
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The Gaze
Today I want to talk about the act of looking in film. Looking is perhaps the simplest activity one can do. You just open your eyes, and that’s it – you’re looking. When we see a movie we look at the screen, we look at the characters, we look at the story unfold. One thing about looking in film is that…
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Hateful Love
Creating conflict in film is an extremely hard task to carry out. The characters must be believable, their actions must be motivated and triggered by something, the dialogue and the action cannot fall flat and the whole story must end with some kind of development. Conflict cannot be stagnant. Many writers have failed in delivering…
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Little Man, Big Picture
Tarkovsky strikes again. I finally got through his final movie, the Swedish language film The Sacrifice, the last work of his released in 1986 right before the filmmaker’s premature death. Tarkovsky is someone who I consider to be one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and perhaps, of all time. His films resemble slow, majestic, mature…
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The Man Who Lost
Today’s topic: powerlessness in 2014’s Leviathan. Every once in a while, foreign cinema plays the role of a wake up call. It shakes the film industry to its core, reminding both the audience and the producers what movies should be about. When movies where born there was no place for Captain America, no understanding of the hot…
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