In this episode, Tyler and David are joined by Scott Nye to discuss the films they saw at this year’s AFI Fest, including 3 Faces, All Good, Ash Is Purest White, Bird Box, Cold War, Dead Horse Nebula, Dead Pigs,...
Late in Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces, the fourth film he’s made in Iran while banned from filmmaking, Panahi (playing himself) encounters three men on the edge of a small village he’s been visiting. They dispense some tips for sleeping rough...
Horror cinema is in an uncomfortable stage right now, too wrapped up in the structures of the past to convey quality to audiences of the present. We can say something that emulates a John Carpenter film is good, because we...
“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” begins as documentary, proceeds as political comedy, climaxes as a live event, and concludes as the most laser-accurate indictment of the modern culture we’ve yet seen since neofascism...
“I make vases,” Carlos Reygadas declared to the brief Q&A following (what I believe to be) the U.S. premiere of his new film, Our Time, at AFI Fest. “They’re for people to through through, to sit in and consider, and...
With its crisp black and white photography and its preoccupation with folk music, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War bears an initial resemblance last year’s Song of Granite. In that beautiful film, though, director Pat Collins told the story of his folk...
In addition to just looking cool, one of the main effects that a fisheye lens has is leaving you unable to forgot about the presence of the camera. This is especially true when that camera, with that lens, is panning....
Whether they are philosophers, sociologists, ecologists, biologists or filmmakers, plenty of people have wondered whether to define humanity as a part of nature or apart from it. That question certainly seems to be in the air in Wolfgang Fischer’s forceful,...
Mia Hansen-Løve has built her films on the kind of trauma rarely explored onscreen, for its effects are minute, indescribable, and typically tempered by the person experiencing them. Whether it’s encountering an ex-boyfriend you still long for (Goodbye, First Love),...
Is anything actually worth living for against all odds or do we just soldier on out of primal instincts of self-preservation? It’s a solemn question to ponder, which is perhaps why Susanne Bier’s Bird Box only really goes so far as to...
