Lydia Tár is dead
To paraphrase a quote, I am less interested in Lydia Tár’s dreams than in the near certainty that the Társ of the real world don’t make it out of Staten Island. Art is the opposite of rent. Artists...
View ArticleViewed in secret: The People’s Joker and the ownership of myth
The regular claims that superhero stories are a kind of ‘modern mythology’ almost never account for the fact that these are corporate-owned characters, fiercely protected. In 2014, DC Entertainment...
View ArticleIn Memoriam: Kenneth Anger’s cinematic incantations
‘Making a movie is casting a spell,’ said Kenneth Anger about his lifelong profession, his unique and spectacular talent, his very own dark magic. That certainly describes how I was lured into his...
View ArticleProduct placement, the movie: how ‘pre-awareness’ has come to rule Hollywood
We’ve always had stories that inspired toys (Star Wars) and toys that inspired stories (Transformers)—then, inevitably, Toy Story itself. Two recent films, though, feel less like play and more like...
View ArticleConsumerist realism
The refusal to ‘sell out’ may have guaranteed a lifetime of ‘impotent marginality’ but at least it acknowledged that something real was at stake, the unambiguous articulation of which really mattered....
View ArticleBuried in memory: trauma and colonial amnesia in Ivan Sen’s Limbo
On the tail of a series of sublime and haunting Australia Crime pictures to release in the post-pandemic era, Limbo joins a canon of thoughtful, skilfully made films that present a harrowing subtext...
View ArticleA journey into male supremacy: Robin Summons’ Victim
Victim doesn’t make explicit the link between attacks such as those by Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian — themselves connected in a causal chain of male supremacist influence — and the prtoganist’s...
View ArticleThe Plains exposes the psychic terrain of Victoria’s highways
The Plains charts the psychic terrain of the freeway in miniature, peeling back the lid of the private vehicle to expose just one of the millions of dramas taking place in simultaneity, severed from...
View ArticleDebt to the world
A Difficult Year misses the solution evident in its own story. Were it to look more closely, the film might challenge the weak political clichés it skewers with powerful truths: that those worried...
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