It’s October 26th – Austrian National Day – and I’m sitting with Ms. Rita Azevedo Gomes in her room at the Hotel InterContinental, one floor above the press office of the Viennale, and the faraway sound of an orchestra is coming in from the street. She’s more than delighted to be at the festival – […]| Kinoscope
Like lazy cartographers, many Anglo-centric cinephiles seem comfortable only watching films brought to their attention via a few accepted currents, be they boutique home video labels, distribution companies, or even streaming services. While there are certainly more obvious blind spots in contemporary filmic circles that need to be addressed (such as a majority of India’s […]| Kinoscope
Now underway, the New York Film Festival seems more consolidated than in previous years. As usual, the bulky Main Slate (a staggering 32 films) is a mixture of preferential directors and fresh names. However, the documentary and virtual reality sidebars have vanished, and Currents remains a pale shadow of its former self, back when it […]| Kinoscope
I can’t say I’m all that well versed in interpreting the structural and tonal elements of poetry. But when they’re distilled through the formal elements of cinema, it becomes more understandable to me. Lynn Sachs’ “Swerve” (2022) is heavily informed and inspired by the poetry of Filipino immigrant and former Queens-resident Paolo Javier, particularly those in […]| Kinoscope
“People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.” —Kurt […]| Kinoscope
There’s an episode in the fifth season of the show Community (2009–2015) in which film student Abed (Danny Pudi), the on-the-spectrum pop-culture enthusiast who has a habit of deconstructing everything as if he’s narrating a network comedy, is tasked with the daunting challenge of figuring out whether Nicolas Cage is good or bad. Not is he a […]| Kinoscope
Payal Kapadia didn’t exactly set out to document discriminatory casteist university education from the perspective of film students in contemporary India. But a bad situation took root around her, and she rose to it; Kapadia’s Cannes prizewinner A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), her feature debut, embeds variously sourced student-protest footage within a fictional narrative love-letter […]| Kinoscope
Invisible people put up with the weight of the world so that others can carry on with their livelihood, be it happy or miserable, exciting or boring. They are facilitators, liaisons who provide something unseen to make reality bearable. Discretion is crucial in their profession. Hospitality workers are the silent partners laboring to maintain an […]| Kinoscope
Notwithstanding a battalion of toy soldiers closing in on his breakfast, the boy appears to be safe. He’s at home with the woman who looks like his mother. Then the man who looks like his father comes to the door. “Don’t open!” the boy says, then shouts, repeating himself many times until finally running away, […]| Kinoscope
Artavazd Peleshian makes action films. They just don’t resemble the kind Hollywood manufactures. Though they can be summed up in a line (men preventing rocks from falling on train tracks in 1964’s “Mountain Patrol,” shepherds herding their flock through hazardous terrain in 1975’s “The Seasons”), a lot happens with form in these short and medium-length […]| Kinoscope
