He has no grasp of rhythm, variation, dynamics, shape. He knows one kind of scene, a crescendo whose climax must be bolstered by loud dissonant strings, which then cuts to the next scene. This happens over and over again for 2 hours. This director, who thinks himself above the prose of cinema, which he doesn’t understand and cannot use, aims for poetry and achieves doggerel. Having ignored the history of cinema, he thinks shot/reverse-shots, which he hates, can only be…

By the 50th consecutive centre-framed composition I wanted to go home.

Incidentally, you probably couldn’t make a film less in the spirit of Kiyoshi Kurosawa if that was your intention. Not only the camera (KK is about the least restricted, most versatile director of the camera working today, the one most invested in the possibilities of lateral and projective space) but the lead-footed telegraphing mistaken for oppressive consistency. If you could reduce Kurosawa to one principle, it would be the…

Cure is integrally cinematic, which is to say that any discussion that attempts to separate some narrative or thematic content from the film’s mise en scène is doomed from the outset. Kurosawa thinks filmically, rather than attempting to give external ideas filmic form; there is not a set of beliefs, and perhaps not even a subject matter in any ordinary sense, to which Cure responds. In this way he is closer to Jean-Luc Godard or Howard Hawks than to the…

The long dialogue between Anne and François is possibly the densest thing Rohmer ever filmed. He had such a strong sense of what people say because they feel it, what people say because they are trying to find out what they feel, what people say because they know the effect it will have on someone else, what people say before they know the effect it will have on someone else, and the musicalised turmoil of all that coming together. What…

It’s very systematic in certain elements — framing through apertures and around foreground objects, slow motion musical sequences, shots of mirrors and clocks — and actually quite haphazard in others — the montage and, especially in the first two reels, the camera direction. This is sometimes arresting and sometimes not. At the worst extreme there are problems of bad taste — the whip pans in the meeting where Leung and Cheung mutually acknowledge their spouses’ infidelity are corrupt and should…

Jane Schoenbrun clearly has an interest in texture, colour and light and wants to go the whole hog with it. A great deal of care has gone into the realisation of this interest on the screen. The problem is that it remains entirely mortgaged to miserabilist allegory so relentlessly overplayed that it becomes the altar on which all else is sacrificed. None of the normal film stuff works. The performances are dreadfully overdirected, so that nothing about what these actors…

I think more than straightforward self-reflexivity (which in auteurism land justifies almost anything) Shyamalan is a filmmaker who is interested in a kind of discursive 'thickening' -- at several levels, from the gaps his editing leaves around his very particular dialogue to the Twist itself, which holds the promise of opening up a paradigmatic* axis beneath the syntagmatic axis of the temporal-linear unfolding of a film. I say 'holds the promise' because, for me, it is hard to tell how…

Essai d'ouverture, praised by everyone and perhaps my best short film (or even my best film outright), only received a mention in the press eight years after it was filmed. It's a bit disappointing, but it puts the filmmaker in a higher moral category: you make films for the pleasure of making them and for showing them. Full stop. We fall back into the splendid anonymity of many great filmmakers (Bernard-Deschamps, Badger, Bard, Barnet, Cottafavi, Kumashiro) or painters or writers,…

In my first review of Cerrar los ojos all the way back last October I mentioned that I would write more about it. That November I wrote a long essay about a few films including this one, but it didn't end up getting published. At this point it seems to me like a sketch for the first (or last?) chapter of a larger project on realism in 21st century narrative cinema which I plan to add to with some work…