Cinema Scope

Writing in a very hungover state on an unseasonably warm New Year’s Day, the words on the computer screen about as fuzzy as my brain is functioning, I realize more than ever that, sometimes in life, tough choices need to be made. Like, for example, deciding once again not to participate in that famous film poll and doing my best to avoid any discussion of it, though I understand from glancing at the BBC website that some film about a woman cooking potatoes directed by Jeanne Dielman won. Another tough choice: I have gone with the normal formatting of the film Tár, because in all caps it just looks silly. The toughest choice remains, and I am being honest here and not overdramatic. The current economics for small magazines such as…

In 2016, Alice Diop set out to the northern French town of Saint Omer to attend the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese woman accused of killing her baby girl. The French media was enraptured by the crime; the details made for a textbook fait divers, a sensational news item spun by journalists desperate to satiate their scandal-starved readers. Yet, as the trial unfolded, Kabou and her actions remained distant and impenetrable; her case became a kind of mockery of our legal systems, reliant as they are on classification and concrete truths to administer justice. At every turn, Kabou defied expectations: she was an educated woman, beautifully articulate and poised even as she repeatedly tweaked her story depending, it seemed, on her mood. Baffled by her own decision to abandon…

“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name and I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him…”—opening paragraph of Nicolas Blake’s The Beast Must Die (1938) “To enter a moviehouse on Lavalle Street and find myself (not without surprise) on the Gulf of Bengal or on Wabash Avenue seems preferable to entering the same moviehouse and finding myself (not without surprise) in Lavalle Street.” Referring to the Buenos Aires street traditionally associated with moviegoing, Jorge Luis Borges felt compelled to open his positive review in the literary magazine Sur of the recent Argentine film La fuga (1937) with this “confession,” lest someone accuse him of blind patriotism. Three months earlier, he…

After a protracted absence, Todd Field is back, and with a film that more than compensates for the wait. However, Tár shouldn’t be gauged in terms of some value system based on the number of years that Field has gone without a new movie (16, following his second feature, Little Children [2006]), any more than the gap of years between new works by Field’s mentor, Stanley Kubrick, should have been a measure for his movies. Tár is, on its own and without any context for this particular filmmaker, a gigantic and bold film spilling over with ideas, emotions, and a sneakily transgressive notion that cinema can still express the biggest concepts on the most personal level while delivering a weighty entertainment. It isn’t that Field has just stepped into the batter’s…

“I love cinema because its images are traces of something forgotten, a lost part of you. Suddenly, in a flash, you are reacquainted with your past…” This, from Pierre Clémenti in his A Few Personal Messages, a collection of essayistic journal entries written over the course of the 18 months he spent in a pair of Italian prisons, articulates the Bazinian party line in its sentimental dimension. We are moved by films because, briefly, deeply, they convince us that the past isn’t irretrievable, that life isn’t forever slipping away. But in his usual manner, Clémenti immediately complicates this, narrowing the perspective to an actor’s: “And at the very moment you’re playing the part, you become the person who will one day look back at yourself.” To be an actor, to…

Officially, Bertrand Bonello’s last three features comprise a triptych about youth, but there’s also a shadow interpretation waiting to be made of Nocturama (2016), Zombi Child (2019), and Coma as an extended, eccentric treatise on horror-movie history and aesthetics—call it a self-reflexive Trilogy of Terror. Whatever its debts to Le diable probablement (1977), Nocturama hewed closer to Romero than Bresson, restaging the late-capitalist tragedy of Dawn of the Dead (1978) in a Parisian department store minus any visible zombies, but with the creeping sense of persecution and dread intact. Less successfully, but with true daring, the partially Haitian-set Zombi Child walked with Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur down the path of mordant, morbid post-colonial allegory, waving at Candyman (1992) and The Craft (1995) along the way. And now, made deep…