“If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.” - Celine (in Richard Linklater's 1995 film Before Sunrise)
There are many works of art about making works of art, but few as absorbing and emotionally arresting as Josephine Decker’s masterwork. All of Decker’s films deserve to be more widely seen, but there’s a singular magic to Madeline’s Madeline. It was the film, and the year, that Helena Howard should have been cemented as a superstar. As the eponymous teenager, Howard is volatile and fragile; split between her complex relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July, breathtaking) and her deceptively exploitative yet affectionate relationship with the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (a tender Molly Parker). Decker has such a gift for haptic, expressionistic filmmaking that demands your active attention and emotion. It’s wildly original and innovative in its technical framework, but never distances the audience—the familiar growing pains of the coming-of-age genre hit hard. A vital, affecting piece of cinema to add into your favorites at haste. - Ella Kemp
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Asch, Mark. "Jia Zhangke and the Chinese Century." Notebook (June 7, 2025) ["What is cinematic realism when reality itself is so quickly and comprehensively changing?"]
Benton, Michael D. "The Power of Stories." The Personal Success Podcast (September 4, 2023) ["Michael Benton is an associate professor of humanities and film studies at Bluegrass Community and technical College in Lexington, Kentucky. Narrative Psychology focuses on how we perceive the events of our lives through stories. One of the most powerful ways we can experience transformation is by changing our stories. This can be done in many ways."]
Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "How Sinners Revives the Vampire." Critics at Large (May 1, 2025) ["The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is no exception. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss what “Sinners,” which fuses historical realism with monster-movie-style horror, illuminates about America in 2025. They trace the archetype from such nineteenth-century texts as “The Vampyre” and “Dracula” to the “Twilight” moment of the aughts, when Edward Cullen, an ethical bloodsucker committed to abstinence, turned the vampire from a predatory outsider into a Y.A. heartthrob. What do he and his ilk have to say today? “The vampire is the one who can unsettle our notions, and maybe give us new notions,” Cunningham says. “The vampire comes in and asks, ‘But have you considered this?’ ”"]
Danks, Adrian. "The Long Goodbye." Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["For her part, Brackett, unlike many other writers who bristled at the liberties taken by Altman with their scripts, enjoyed working with the director and embraced the riffs, improvisations and idiosyncratic points of emphasis that he brought to the film. What also attracted Altman was the chance to work once again with Elliott Gould, one of the two stars of his breakthrough smash hit MASH (1970), but who had become persona non grata in Hollywood after a couple of failed and abandoned productions. But when looking at the finished film, it is hard to imagine that it wasn’t a project conceived by Altman, as its sensibility, visual style, sound, idiosyncratic choice of “actors” from within the cinema and beyond, exploration of environment, and revisionist approach to a classic genre all seem tailormade for and by the filmmaker. But this also reveals the indelible stamp that Altman placed – as always – on his material during production: stacking the cast with a rogue’s gallery of figures rarely used in or new to the cinema (like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson, baseball player Jim Bouton, and Danish folk singer Nina van Pallandt); exploring the cramped and then capacious locations he carefully selected including his own home in the Malibu Colony; experimenting with a relentlessly mobile camera that shifts and zooms in and out of Marlowe’s perspective crafting a diaphanous, fluid and fully dimensional sense of environment (it is one of the great LA films); embracing the possibilities of collaboration; and allowing actors to add bits of business and improvise lines during filming. One of the most memorable and even charming aspects of The Long Goodbye is Marlowe’s “interior” monologue, dreamed-up and delivered by Gould as an almost stream-of-consciousness muttering that displaces and even reverses the common device of the controlling voiceover so central to many examples of the detective film and classic film noir. Gould’s often jazzy and insular line readings rarely communicate a sense of control or superior knowledge – and are almost never heard by anyone but us, him and maybe his cat – but they do draw us closer to his view of the world."]
Gallagher, Shea. "The Fate of Lee Khan." Senses of Cinema #113 (February 2025) ["What distinguishes the action in The Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones from Hu’s other films – and certainly those which had come before – is the presence of choreographer Sammo Hung, who was as representative of the new wave of Hong Kong martial artists as Angela Mao, if not more so. Earlier King Hu films had been choreographed by Han Ying-chieh (who plays the itinerant begging musician here, a reused stock character from Come Drink With Me), but Golden Harvest’s prized stuntman Sammo Hung was Hu’s pick to help him bridge the gap between wuxia style combat and kung fu. There is no shortage of swordplay in The Fate of Lee Khan, but as assailants are disarmed – or, in many cases, the blades are literally broken, offering a neat metaphor for unarmed combat’s domination – the kung fu takes centre stage. Teo notes the multi-dimensionality of this type of action, as a character’s mastery of unarmed combat communicates a higher level of skill, if we are to understand unarmed combat as traditionally the highest form of combat. Hu’s penchant for trampolines and Hung’s penchant for backflips are unsurprisingly an excellent match, and Hu’s abstracted editing style (the effect of “momentary indiscernibility” coined by David Bordwell as “the glimpse”) complements Sammo Hung’s own style of blurred motion. Bordwell has done the maths and tells us the average shot length in the final reel of the film is 2.4 seconds, but many of Hu’s “glimpse” shots run between 7 and 14 frames. Cross-cutting rapid flashes conveying pure (often physically impossible) motion with the impressive legibility of Hung’s stuntwork creates an altogether different rhythm and effect in both The Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones. The expertise of the performer shines through, but the ecstatic, faster-than-the-eye quality still propels these sequences along."]
Kannas, Alexia. "Chinatown." Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["The impact Roman Polanski’s 1974 film has had on the mythologisation of Los Angeles is hard to understate. Written by L.A. native Robert Towne, Chinatown draws on and refigures the history of the California water wars, instigated in the first decades of the 20th century by the city of Los Angeles’ efforts to secure the water needed to sustain its rapid growth. Key to this enterprise was the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was built between 1905 and 1915 to divert water from the Owens Valley in Eastern California towards the city. This development caused considerable tension between the city and Californian farmers, which played out over the course of the following decades. In his lauded essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004), which enacts the circulation of images that Polan describes, Thom Anderson points out that this history has always been public. But in transposing it to a 1937 setting and recasting the city’s capitalist expansion as a story of deep-seated corruption, Towne’s screenplay left an indelible mark on the popular conception of how Los Angeles got its water."]
Kettler, Mark T. "A Death of Despair in Wisborg." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["Film is a sequence of photographs. Any two individual cells in a reel may resemble each other. But when shown in rapid sequence, they reveal movement. This past Christmas, director Robert Eggers released a new telling of the now familiar vampire myth, Nosferatu (2024). It is an adaptation of an adaptation: a retelling of Fritz Murnau’s classic 1922 Nosferatu, itself a famously unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. These stories are cells in a sequence. They share a fundamental architecture. In each version an ambitious real estate agent travels to distant Transylvania to conclude the sale of local property to a reclusive count. The buyer, a vampire, preys upon the young agent before traveling across the ocean to his hometown, where he hunts the local population until his eventual demise. But these structural similarities camouflage deep differences in plot, character, and tone. Each iteration of the story offers a snapshot of the moment of its creation. Intentionally or not, they reflect back on their authors, on the societies that produce them. They reveal the anxieties that preoccupy their makers, the quiet assumptions that inform and structure their worldview. The rough similarity of these stories throws their differences into stark relief. Aspects of Eggers’ film that may seem incidental, are revealed to be artistic choices laden with meaning. By flipping rapidly through these cells, we can also perform a crude sort of animation, revealing tectonic transformations in fundamental assumptions about gender, familiarity and otherness – even authority and trust. Dracula celebrated the triumph of Western modernity. Murnau’s film despaired at the horror of the First World War and the folly of Germany’s leaders. By contrast, the dominant themes of Eggers’ new film are terrifying loneliness and exploitation, reflecting our own contemporary exhaustion with atomized, increasingly meaningless, and often predatory, interpersonal relationships."]
Lim, Sandra E. "Cinema of Reflexivity: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Logic of Terror in Haneke’s The White Ribbon." Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["Haneke asserts that the film is not solely about the origins of German Fascism, but rather an exploration of “…the roots of all kinds of terrorism – whether politically right, politically left or religious.”1 His framing of violence as universal and recurring opens the door for readings of the film beyond historical accounts. Magdalena Zolkos builds on Haneke’s assertion, offering that The White Ribbon also moves beyond the usual psycho-historical reading of authoritarianism as generational and transmitted through repressive child-rearing. Instead, she suggests that the children internalise the rigid morality and logic of the dominant male figures in the village. If the children are at the root of the terror, as the school teacher suggests, their violent acts do not resist patriarchal rule but instead mutate and turn back on themselves, becoming something more terrifying."]
West, Stephen. "Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration." Philosophize This! #232 (July 7, 2025) ["Today we talk about the book The Crisis of Narration by the philosopher Byung Chul Han. We talk about the history of storytelling. Walter Benjamin's distinction between a Paris fire and a revolution in Madrid. The effects of social media on memory. Story telling vs story selling. AI as pure Intelligenz lacking Geist. The ability for stories to give shape to suffering. The importance of boredom for self-discovery."]
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