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There was an independent cinema in Folly Beach, South Carolina, that was showing Good Time (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2017). A film set in the marginal spaces of Queens? Count me in. I left the theater spellbound ...

Paul Preciado is an aphorism machine, the David Bowie of contemporary philosophy. Like other contemporary thinkers (what used to be called “public intellectuals” – Andrea Long Chu, Hito Steyerl), he writes in e...

Some background The only way to begin responsibly is with some facts about the status of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, the long-time home of the Silent Film Festival up to and including this year’s edit...

This midsummer, in the centre of Italy, I encountered an enviably rich film festival with more than 30 great historic films, all unseen by me. There were three by Jean Renoir, four by Michael Powell, two by Ern...

The “Czechoslovak film miracle” of the 1960s has long been synonymous with the Czechoslovak New Wave, a term principally applied to works produced by a storied cluster of filmmakers who emerged that decade thro...

“To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept”  - (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New interna...

Crowds erupted in the narrow streets outside Sarajevo’s stately National Theatre as security guards cleared a space for someone unexpected – though we had a pretty good inkling who it was – pulling up to the re...

An explicit didactic short about a threesome with identical twin sisters, Good Boys Use Condoms (1998) provides a fascinating insight into Lucile Hadžihalilović’s career and into French cultural politics in the...

Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond brought world-leading scholars and filmmakers to Wurundjeri country for a two-day conference to navigate how the titular genre moves through time, space and cu...

Assalto ao trem pagador (Assault on the Pay Train, 1962) was directed by Roberto Farias, produced by Herbert Richers and is a dramatisation of the Central do Brasil pay train robbery that occurred just outside ...

The rhythmic cogs of the machinery click and shuffle, a steady beat emerges with each press of the tin, each bubble of the milk. A behemoth of industrial power, the milk-cannery seems to twitch and stir as thou...

At the intersection of theory and practice, Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond put horror scholars in dialogue with filmmakers and festival producers. This enabled audiences to understand new di...

The third film written by Josef Skružný and his nephew Elmar Klos to star Vlasta Burian, An Old Gangster’s Molls (Milenky starého kriminálníka, 1927) is built around two of Czechoslovakia’s biggest stars. Nickn...

Helena Solberg’s name has been featured in histories of Brazilian cinema primarily as an exception to the rule: she was the only female director associated with Cinema Novo – the filmmaking movement that politi...

This year's Berlinale was marked by Nicolas Philibert's surprising victory with his modest and intimate documentary about a Parisian psychiatric institution, which prompted us to question the established bounda...

Cinema Novo, Brazil’s politically minded 1960s New Wave, is often discussed as a Rio de Janeiro movement, but there was also a rich scene in the early ’60s in Glauber Rocha’s home state of Bahia. Rocha himself ...

The story begins and ends in the street. The protagonist first emerges from the crowd, wife and children in tow. By film’s end, he has vanished into the churning mass of pedestrians, utterly alone. In between, ...

“If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier above the entrance”. These are the words of none other than Jean Renoir paying tribute to his colle...

Out of the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I have ever seen. For the record, Dassin’s most famous films, The Naked City and Rififi, are among his lesser works. P...

“How old are you?” Henri Ferré, Jean Gabin’s character in Henri Decoin’s Razzia sur la chnouf (1955), regularly asks women.  One replies, "What does it matter? We age quickly in this life."  Each woman f...

In a review of Club Zero, Jessica Hausner’s latest feature, which premiered in Competition at Cannes this year, Charles Bramesco calls the director “Austria’s most fearless button-pusher.” Given that her compat...

Every cinephile has at least one formative film where the mere mention of the title functions as a time machine, transporting the individual back to the day the work was first viewed. For a fleeting moment thei...

Some people leave a pronounced mark on you in life, and Bérénice is that person for me. During my 20 years at Senses of Cinema, I worked with her regularly and came to think of her as a friend. After hearing of...

Shame on Dry Land, by Swedish writer/director Axel Petersén, is a flinty noir set in sunny Malta. The film, which had its World Premiere at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, is as slippery as its protagonist, ...

With a gaze that radiates a dreamy but determined freshness, the beautiful Leonor Silveira in Manoel de Oliveira's Abraham's Valley (Vale Abraão, 1993) graces the poster of this 55th edition of the Directors’ F...

There is often something intangible about the cinematic images we regard onscreen that continually inspires our curiosity, attention, and seemingly endless questioning of cinema’s nature as art. Philosophy of f...

b. 8 March 1906, Iur'evets, Russia d. 28 December 1973, Moscow, USSR Fifty years after his death, Aleksandr Arturovich Rou remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Unio...

b. February 27 1932, London, United Kingdom d. March 23 2011, Los Angeles, United States It was fitting that, in 1967, Elizabeth Taylor starred as Helen of Troy, the mythological daughter of Zeus whose face w...

When he was seven, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote in his diary, “I want to be a writer, producer, director, special effects man. I know how to do everything and I know everything” (p. 1). For this millennial wunder...

b. September 22, 1946 (birthdate as stated on passport), Guangzhou, China While several filmmakers have become synonymous with specific genres, few have carved out as inimitable and identifiable a niche within...

Locarno is, and can feel, half a world away from Hollywood, but much of the press talk leading up to this year’s 76th Locarno Film Festival concerned the concurrent SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild strikes in the US...

“Well, to be completely honest, the award’s very nice and all, but I’m only here for the gig. I was ignorant to this whole thing until just a while ago. I’m just amazed by this place, man. It’s so beautiful an...

As we move through the spooky season to summer blockbusters, the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema continues. Issue 107 covers Senses of Cinema founding editor, Bill Mousoulis’, latest film, My Darling ...

With vibrant tropical colours and a penchant for the grotesque, Macunaíma (1969) is a strange but delightful masterpiece of Brazilian cinema. Its creator, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (1932-1988), was one of best d...

In 1976, Czech writer and scholar Antonín Jaroslav Liehm wrote a scathing appraisal of the current state of Czechoslovak cinema entitled “Triumph of the Untalented”. Juxtaposing the “fresh look at the world” of...