CineAction articles from March 22 2009

CineAction archives from March 22 2009

The skull beneath the skin.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... ROBIN WOOD The anxiety we carry within us, all our broken dreams, the inexplicable cruelty, the fear of death, the painful insight into our earthly condition, have worn out our hope of a divine salvation. The cries of our faith and doubt...

National Reconciliation and its performative limitations: John Boorman's in My Country and Fanta Regina Nacro's Night of Truth.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... Introduction: Reconciliation--A Very Different Final Solution After living under an apartheid government since 1948, on May 10, 1994, South Africa witnessed the presidential inauguration of political prisoner and human rights activist...

Toronto workers' art in Global Hollywood.(Toronto, Canada)
March 22, 2009... Off camera group art show at Filmport Studios, 225 Commissioners St., Toronto October 3-18 The pieces in the show are viewable at: offcameraatfilmport2008.blogspot.com Hollywood has long had an awkward relationship to art. Often considered...

Kiarostami's life lessons: how art flourishes where it would suffer, and struggles where it should thrive.(Abbas Kiarostami)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... I presented an earlier version of the following essay in 2000, shortly after I had seen Taste of Cherries and American Beauty each for the first time. As the people running this country continue to flirt with the possibility of a war with Iran,...

Paul Newman (1925-2008).(In memoriam)
March 22, 2009... Paul Newman began his film career in the mid-fifties, a period of transition within the Hollywood cinema. Although in the rebel mould of Marlon Brando and James Dean who also evidenced the changes taking place both within the industry and...

Six films.(TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)(Movie review)
March 22, 2009... I am reviewing six films screened this year that I found engaging and appreciated seeing. There are several others, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys, Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City, Rithy Panh's The Sea Wall (see Florence Jacobowitz's review), that I...

Un barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall.(TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)(Movie review)
March 22, 2009... Rithy Panh's Un barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall was screened as part of the Special Presentations section at this year's festival, coming and going with surprisingly little attention or press. It features a very strong cast including...

TIFF '08 and Liverpool.(TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)(Movie review)
March 22, 2009... This year's Toronto International Film Festival seemed to me to be less well-run than in previous years. Whether it was the depressing experience of trying to buy tickets for the public screenings and discovering that a contribution of $250...

Performance, realism and melodrama.(TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)
March 22, 2009... Toronto's Festival always provides a buffet of enticing choices for spectatorship of films from all over the world. Critics can follow favourite directors, genres or national cinemas; or selection of films can be random--what fits in the...

Nicholas Ray's King of Kings.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... Most critics see decline in the last phase of Nicholas Ray's career resulting from his mistaken decision to direct two epics produced by Samuel Bronston. Although Ray's King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963) receive support from...

We the undead.(NADJA)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives. Its essential subject--in our century of disappearances--is the soul, to which it offers a global...

Atrocities at the door: Peter Brook's Tell Me Lies, images of terror and brechtian aesthetics.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... SCOTT MACKENZIE As we cannot invite the audience to fling itself in to the story as if it were a river and let itself be carried vaguely hither and thither, the individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that...

Deciphering Lust, Caution.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... Lust, Caution (Se, Jie), the film which took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2007, was director Ang Lee's return to Asian filmmaking after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). After receiving the Oscar for Brokeback Mountain in...

On the road to renewed relevance: Jacques Tati's Trafic.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... Even among Tati-philes, it is classified, at best, a pleasant coda. But Jacques Tati's Trafic, back on the autoroute in the form of a stylish, 2 DVD set, finds itself again on the road to relevance, the product of a delirious political period...

The art of persuasion: or: have you seen this man's films lately?(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... It appears that the discipline of cinema studies is entering an unprecedented stage, following a brief, misguided excursion into the realm of what has been dubbed the 'post-theory' era in cinema studies. A fairly recent survey of this...