Cinema Scope

- Madame, quels sont ces yeux nombreux qui dans la nuit regardent? - Monsieur soudain ceci, soudain ceci m’étonne Il n’y a plus personne pourtant moi je vous parle et vous vous m’entendez puisque vous répondez! Monsieur à travers tout quelles sont ce

In 2016, Alice Diop set out to the northern French town of Saint Omer to attend the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese woman accused of killing her baby girl. The French media was enraptured by the crime; the details made for a textbook fait diver

“To enter a moviehouse on Lavalle Street and find myself (not without surprise) on the Gulf of Bengal or on Wabash Avenue seems preferable to entering the same moviehouse and finding myself (not without surprise) in Lavalle Street.” Referring to the

After a protracted absence, Todd Field is back, and with a film that more than compensates for the wait. However, Tár shouldn’t be gauged in terms of some value system based on the number of years that Field has gone without a new movie (16, followin

“I love cinema because its images are traces of something forgotten, a lost part of you. Suddenly, in a flash, you are reacquainted with your past…” This, from Pierre Clémenti in his A Few Personal Messages, a collection of essayistic journal entries

Officially, Bertrand Bonello’s last three features comprise a triptych about youth, but there’s also a shadow interpretation waiting to be made of Nocturama (2016), Zombi Child (2019), and Coma as an extended, eccentric treatise on horror-movie histo

The first thing one is liable to notice while watching A Woman Escapes, a feature-length collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, is that the film comprises three image formats: 16mm, 3D, and 4K. The second is that ea

About 30 minutes into Laura Citarella’s first feature Ostende (2011), a waiter named Paco (Julián Tello) asks one of his customers, Laura (Laura Peredes), if he can tell her an idea he has for a movie. As Paco explains, the film will begin at night,

Early in Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1987), the porn performer Sharon Mitchell tells the audience at her striptease show that cameras and microphones are filming the event for her next movie. After reassuring the audience that they won’t be see

Despite the noises at night, the things we might see out of the corner of our eye, and the dark, winding hallways, there’s something comforting about a haunted house: we all have a desire for the past to not be completely gone, and maybe to think tha

Not since Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009) has a cop movie been so sublimely uneventful as Alessandro Comodin’s The Adventures of Gigi the Law, a slack portrait of an affable officer in Friuli’s polizia locale. Pier Luigi Mecchia (a.k.a

For its casting of non-professional actors within a mostly scripted narrative, Antoine Bourges’ latest feature, Concrete Valley, has already been called a docu-fiction “hybrid.” Set in the East Toronto neighbourhood of Thorncliffe Park, an initial la

Oscillating abruptly and often painfully between conflicting states of adolescence and adulthood, Eva (Daniela Marin Navarro), the teenaged protagonist of Valentina Maurel’s I Have Electric Dreams, seems acutely uncomfortable within her own skin. Whi

The freight train barrelling along a moonlit overpass shows no signs of stopping, as Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) cries out to Kyle (Jackson Sluiter), the latter just out of earshot and tramping along the tracks ahead. We’re left with only a protracted

The case of Darezhan Omirbaev reminds us that in cinema, the line between eminence and obscurity can be very fine indeed. Throughout his career, which is now in its fourth decade, the Kazakh filmmaker has received official approbation in the form of

“It’s something I need to do,” phys-ed teacher David (Steve Laplante) unconvincingly tells his long-suffering wife Isabelle (Marie-Laurence Moreau) about the space-simulation program he’s signed up for early in Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, a droll, bon

The Kingdom: Exodus (2022), the long-delayed third and final installment of Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred’s supernatural television series, is kind of stupid. This doesn’t mean that Exodus isn’t enjoyable (it very much is), or that it lacks merit

When the death of Jean-Luc Godard was announced on September 13, 2022, it seemed that the French New Wave itself had died. That impression, led by a baby-boomer understanding of Godard’s work, flows from the double assumption that the Swiss-born Goda

When Jean-Marie Straub’s La France contre les robots—filmed in December 2019 down the street from his apartment in Rolle—received an online premiere courtesy of Andy Rector’s Kino Slang in May of 2020, it was a small beacon in dark times. Not that th

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is the third in a series of portrait films by Laura Poitras focused on prominent activists pitched in quixotic struggle against dark forces undergirding the US as a global capitalist superpower. Unlike the divisive fi

Whenever the decaying prospects for original filmmaking in the US finally force him to the hinterlands of prestige television, James Gray should consider adapting The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro’s doorstop biography of New York City master planner R

“Who’s out there?” Adam Driver’s Jack Gladney whispers to the ceiling (from whence we are staring down) with all the self-seriousness of a character in the thesis play of a drama student enamoured with but not entirely comprehending Brecht. “Who are

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel Women Talking is set in a remote Mennonite community that exists out of time and under its own jurisdiction, with its own rules and superstitions. For years, the nocturnal disturbances that left l