Capture the wind It’s there as Monica Vitti opens a slighted window shutter on a dilapidated shack on the Aeolian Islands in L’Avventura, his 1960 showpiece. It’s there again for Vitti in 1961’s intellectually stultifying La Notte just as it’s there for David Hemmings’ morally misplaced fashion photographer in Blowup (1966). It’s a frequently […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
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The 25 Best Sci-fi Movies of The 1980s
In the post-Star Wars decade of the 1980s, science fiction films continued to flourish, now with the added incentive that they could command big box office receipts. Franchises were popular, as were big event films, and adding elements from other genres was big, too (like sci-fi horror, and sci-fi comedy), and filmmakers as diverse as […]
Pulling Focus: Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
To truly and in earnest look upon Chinese cinema’s resurgence that, by the late 1980s was amassing some of the world’s most austere, original, and acclaimed works, one needs a modicum of societal understanding and historical context. In 1976, with the death of Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution ended and the Beijing Film Academy reopened. […]
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The 25 Best Sci-Fi Movies of The 1970s
For science fiction cinema the 1970s, particularly the films pre-1977––when Star Wars was released and shifted the popcorn paradigm for better or worse––was a golden age. Diverse filmmakers like Woody Allen, Robert Altman, John Boorman, John Carpenter, and Andrei Tarkovsky, as prime examples, took great risks, combined arthouse urges tempered with genre tropes, and cultural […]
Pulling Focus: Kenneth Anger’s Magic Lantern Cycle
“The most exciting use of cinema I’ve seen.” – Tennessee Williams Look Back in Anger Is there a filmmaker alive today that’s as notorious, unflinching, and otherworldly as octogenarian and old hand, Kenneth Anger? Arriving from the postwar America experimental film movement as a sort of answer, at least initially, to Buñuel and […]
Pulling Focus: Paris, Texas (1984)
We’ll always have Paris Just the other day someone asked me what’s my favorite movie. It’s never an easy question to answer, my claim can change from day to day, from season to season, my mood or the colour of the sky can be a decisive aspect to how I’ll defend or deny my choice. […]