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…

Oliveira was a modernist, perhaps the modernist of cinema, holding the totality of what Modernism was across all the art forms very close to him because, like the modernists in literature, painting and theatre, he also held the nineteenth century very close to him. It was natural for cinema, the popular art of the twentieth century born in the nineteenth, to begin with adaptations of novels, the popular art of the nineteenth century born in the eighteenth. Oliveira grew up…

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…

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…

Hong has a strong sense for the heteronomy of language, so it's always rewarding to me when people speak English in his films, because it throws up different permutations and exacerbations of that theme. What is more interesting than the fact that people express themselves differently in a second language (of course they do) is how their faces and comportments change between languages, as they slip into forms of social being that are less known to them because less rehearsed.…