Introduction the editors January 2025 Editorial Welcome, dear readers, to a new year and a new issue of the eclectic and serious discussion of cinema. As with every rotation around the sun, this one too brings the results of our hefty World Poll. Composed of...
Why Do We Poll? the editors January 2025 World Poll Who are end-of-year lists for? I wonder about this all the time. If a cinephile writes a list on the internet, does it have a reader...? “Lists of films will not save you.” Elena Gorfinkel, ‘Against Lists’ f...
World Poll 2024 – Part 1 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 1: Antti Alanen Marcelo Alderete Hussain Al-Dubaisi Francisco Algarín Navarro Michael J. Anderson Swapnil Azad Martyn Bamber Jennifer Lynde Barker Michael Bartlett Arta BarzanjiRaphaël...
World Poll 2024 – Part 2 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 2: José Cabrera Betancort Thomas Caldwell Nicolas Carrasco Kevin Cassidy Guilherme Cavalcanti Dārta Ceriņa Daryl Chin Kristen Marie Coleman Kevin Cronin Jordan Cronk Adrian DanksBrian...
World Poll 2024 – Part 3 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 3: William Edwards Cristóbal Escobar Andre Ferreira Adalberto Fonkén Giampiero Frasca Pablo Gamba Sachin Gandhi John GianvitoSean Gilman Antony I. Ginnane Andrew Goode Jared Gores Mi...
World Poll 2024 – Part 4 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 4: Craig Harshaw Michael Heath Peter Henné Alain Hertay David Heslin Lee HillKierran A. Horner Christoph Huber Parviz Jahed Darik Janik Paul Jeffery Matthew Jordan Craig Harsha...
World Poll 2024 – Part 5 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 4: George Kapaklis Christopher Kearney Max Kleger Rainer Knepperges Botagoz Koilybayeva Gary KramerEugenia Lai Reynaldo Lastre Marc Lauria Richard Leathem Wyeth Leslie Tara Lomax Geo...
World Poll 2024 – Part 6 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 6: Josh B Mabe Ioannis Makris Bob Manning Jack McCulloch Duncan McLean Jamie Mendonça Stefano MiragliaPeter Nagels Virat Nehru Boris Nelepo Walter Neto Ben Nicholson Andy Norton ...
World Poll 2024 – Part 7 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 7: Gavin Oakes Darragh O’Donoghue Lalo Ortega Lydia Pankratova Andreea Pătru Antoni Peris-Grao Andréa Picard Milan PribisicSharat Raju Daniel Ribas Marie-Pierre Richard Peter Rinaldi ...
World Poll 2024 – Part 8 the editors January 2025 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 8: Dan Sallitt Maria San Filippo Blake Simons James Slaymaker Valerie Soe Mark Spratt Tyson Stewart Iván Suárez José Suing-Mendieta Paul Sylvester Tyler ThierJosh Timmermann Diana Va...
David Lynch Obituary Alexia Kannas January 2025 Feature Articles Rita (Laura Harring), the femme fatale with amnesia, wakes in the night having remembered something: “Go with me somewhere,” she whispers to her lover...
Making Mandalas: Illusion and Cinematic Introspection in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Monster Yiju Huang January 2025 Feature Articles “There seems to be no other monster than the labyrinth itself.” – Jacques Lacan In an interview with the film critic Mark Schilling, Kore-eda Hiroka...
A Circumstantial Collective: Tongpan and the Isan Film Group Richard L. MacDonald January 2025 Feature Articles A young man arrives on a long-distance bus in a frontier town on the Thailand–Laos border. At a bus station café he befriends a precariously employed,...
Trick or Treat? Genre Trouble Jeremi Szaniawski January 2025 Feature Articles (Spoiler alert: lots of spoilers.) Halloween may have come and gone, but in view of all the horror currently unfolding in the world, the time is stil...
In Conversation with Tatiana Huezo Cristóbal Escobar January 2025 Interviews As part of the retrospective dedicated to Tatiana Huezo at the 28th edition of the Santiago International Documentary Festival (FIDOCS), the Mexican-S...
An Interview with Co-directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev Gary M. Kramer January 2025 Interviews Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev The timely and topical documentary, Porcelain War, chronicles the lives of a trio of artists in Kharkiv, Ukrain...
“I wanted to draw attention to Artsakh”: An Interview with Sareen Hairabedian Botagoz Koilybayeva January 2025 Interviews Armenian cinema, just like its history, is marked by the scars of displacement and war. The country’s most celebrated filmmaker, Sergei Parajanov, was...
The Marginal Entrapment: An Interview with Laura Carreira about On Falling Hamed Sarrafi January 2025 Interviews The cinematic year 2024 can be defined as one of entrapment, a recurring theme where characters across a diverse spectrum of films find themselves ens...
An Interview with Athina Rachel Tsangari Alena Lodkina January 2025 Interviews In the middle of last year, I travelled from Australia to the Western Highlands in Scotland, right to the edge of the Inner Hebrides archipelago, to w...
Seeing Others, Finding Ourselves: Interview with Yeo Siew Hua about Stranger Eyes Hamed Sarrafi January 2025 Interviews This year at the London Film Festival, Stranger Eyes emerged as a compelling embodiment of three prevalent themes – not just within the festival but a...
A Glistening Snowy Road to The Friend’s House: An Interview with Matthew Rankin about Universal Language Hamed Sarrafi & Ramin S. Khanjani January 2025 Interviews Amidst the London Film Festival’s lineup of films steeped in despair and bleak visions of the future – like swamps pulling their characters deeper int...
NYFF Festival Report: Changing of the Guard Nolan Kelly January 2025 Festival Reports Taking place one year after 7 October 2023 and one month before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the 62nd New York Film Festival was received thro...
Looking for liberation: 68th London Film Festival Nasheed Qamar Faruqi January 2025 Festival Reports To attend the London Film Festival (LFF) in October 2024 is to witness the expression of a world out of joint and to be urgently in search of new and ...
We are all to blame for everything: 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Joshua Bogatin January 2025 Festival Reports “We are all to blame for everything, but if everyone knew it, we'd have paradise on earth.” – Alexander Kluge, Yesterday Girl Flying from my native ...
57th Sitges Film Festival: Audience First Olivia Popp January 2025 Festival Reports As a self-proclaimed “longtime genre film fan”, it felt fortuitous to end up at Spain’s 57th Sitges Film Festival (or in its extended form, the Sitges...
In Search of Audiences: The 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival Petro Alexiou January 2025 Festival Reports The 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival began in unusually dry, warm autumn weather. The festival is a big event in the city’s cultural cale...
“Art is Alive, Independent and Political”: Georgian cinema in Kutaisi and Tallinn Carmen Gray January 2025 Festival Reports In Georgian filmmaker Nutsa Tsikaridze’s Mtskhunvare Mze (Burning Sun), some kids stumble across a dead body beside a river on a hot summer’s day. At ...
Buried Treasures: Silver Screens and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema, by Jane M. Ferguson Duncan Caillard January 2025 Book Reviews Southeast Asian cinemas have been historically marginalised within global screen culture. Wedged between dominant cinemas from the United States, Indi...
Unsettling Relations in Janice Loreck’s Provocations in Women’s Filmmaking Tiia Kelly January 2025 Book Reviews There are certain reverent labels attached to great artists that have historically, in use and by association, foregrounded the work of men: the geniu...
A Title Announcing a Review: A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, by Carrie Rickey Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2025 Book Reviews Bring up the topic of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a discussion, and Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and other male dir...
Brake Fluid Geoff Gardner December 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film When I got to Melbourne University in 1963, Brian Davies had already dropped out and begun what eventually became a stellar career, first in marketing...
Monash ’66 – A Short Annotation on Some of its Making Robin Laurie December 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film I have not seen a print of Monash ’66 for more than 50 years and my memories of the film have a quite a few gaps. Here is what I remember. In 1966 ...
Hey Al Baby Bruce Hodsdon December 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film The below is based on an account of the making of Hey Al Baby by David Minter published in Issue 2 of the Melbourne Film Bulletin, April 1968. In t...
There is Nothing Like Experience Adrian Danks December 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Like many films produced under the auspices of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS), Nothing Like Experience (Peter Carmody, 1970) draws heavi...
Molly & Mobarak Tom Zubrycki November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Molly and Mobarak (2003) continues a path I began in the ’90s with Homelands (1993) and Billal (1996) of making observational documentary essays of Au...
Friends & Enemies Tom Zubrycki November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Unlike many films about union history, Friends & Enemies (1987) is not a retrospective account. It was made as a ‘fly on the wall documentary’ – t...
Bran Nue Dae Tom Zubrycki November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1990 I started production in Broome on Lord of the Bush (1990), a documentary about the enigmatic figure Lord Alistair McAlpine, who had big ambiti...
Homelands Tom Zubrycki November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Homelands (1993) was a departure for me not only in terms of style, but also in terms of content. It was 1992, and I felt it was high time to explore ...
Kemira – Diary of a Strike Tom Zubrycki November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Kemira - Diary of a Strike (1984) started spontaneously. 16 miners from a BHP colliery were suddenly presented with retrenchment notices. They barrica...
Kemira – Diary of a Strike Digby Houghton November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Wollongong is not the first city to encircle itself around an industry, and nor is it the last. Corio Bay to Melbourne’s west installed public housing...
Kohlhiesels Töchter Michael Koller November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film This article is a reworking of an earlier article in Issue 56 of Senses of Cinema that discusses both Kohlhiesels Töchter and Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916...
Carmen Faith Everard November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Love is a bohemian child, It has never, never known the law, If you don't love me, I love you; If I love you, watch out! – Translated from Geor...
A Director and Star Reunite for Forbidden Paradise Shari Kizirian November 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Forbidden Paradise (1924) reaffirmed the promise of two of Hollywood’s most high-profile imports to date, Ernst Lubitsch and Pola Negri, whose histori...