ISSN 1712-9559
Film Reviews
1.
The home video revolution, especially with the success of the DVD format and the massive availability of alternative cinemas in this format, has, for better or for worse, altered the function of the repertory theatre.
2.
Boistered by a half-year sabbatical, Peter Rist was a man on a mission, and watched over 250 films on the big screen in 2002. Rist gives us an idea about what makes Montreal one of the best cities in North American for the discerning filmgoer, and how it can be even better.
3.
Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen presents some compelling strategies for approaching and interpreting the use of sound in film, and provides many avenues for using sound as a way of understanding cinema from a more transcendental frame of mind. What Chion discovers through his process of coming to terms, so to speak, with his expanded vocabulary for sound analysis is that much of the deeper experience we get from cinema is a direct result of the transcendence....
4.
The films of Michael Snow require a certain intellectual disposition. To be fully understood and appreciated they should be placed within the context of art history, and more specifically modernism, where each medium’s intrinsic value is maintained. But aren’t such pretensions to a medium’s purity merely utopian, or in the least fragmentary or incomplet
5.
Thirty-five years after its inception, Wavelength (Ontario, 1967, 45 min.) remains one of the most vital and (still) groundbreaking films in the history of experimental cinema. It is, quite simply, the “Citizen Kane” of experimental cinema. Screenings of Wavelength in and out of academic situations have probably generated more mixed emotions-frustration, boredom, exhilaration and awe (sometimes in the same spectator)- than any other film.
6.
La Région Centrale (Quebec, 1971, 180 min., 16mm, color) is arguably the most spectacular experimental film made anywhere in the world, and for John W. Locke, writing in Artforum in 1973, it was “as fine and important a film as I have ever seen.” If ever the term “metaphor on vision” needed to be applied to a film it should be to this one. Following Wavelength, Michael Snow continued to explore ...
7.
Iran has Samira Makhmalbaf and a famous father named Mohsen. Italy has Asia Argento and a famous father named Dario. The parallels pretty much stop there.
8.
Perhaps not the best giallo ever made, but an interesting entry into the female paranoia film.
9.
A long overdue look at Zulueta's lost cult classic, Arrebato.
10.
Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies, actor turned director Bill Paxton turns in an unsettling religious horror film.
11.
A review which tries to capture the unique experience which is Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.
12.
Steven Soderbergh balances arthouse modernism with conventions of the classical genre to produce nouveau gangster chic.
13.
An in-depth analysis of an overlooked silent film classic by Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanov.
14.
An analysis of the year that was. An improvement over 2000, according to Rist.
15.
Good things do come in small packages, with this subtle and delicate low budget digi-film that dignifies 24 hours in the life of two flawed, yet endearing losers, lovers Alex and J.D.
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