Bernal, Gael García. "Amores Perros Shakes Up Mexico City." MUBI Podcast (July 17, 2025) ["Superstar Gael García Bernal (THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES) and legendary set designer Eugenio Caballero (PAN’S LABYRINTH) help take host Rico Gagliano on a tour of Mexico City’s streets and its cinema — from the golden era of “ranchera” musicals to the making of Alejandro Inarittu’s tectonic breakthrough AMORES PERROS."]
Coppola, Francis Ford. "Director Francis Ford Coppola Keeps His Dream Alive." Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso (September 21, 2025) ["Director Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t just want to make movies. He wants to change them. This was true in 1969 when he co-founded Zoetrope Studios with George Lucas, and it remains true today. We return to our talk with Coppola upon the anniversary of his modern-day Roman epic fable Megalopolis, discussing his decades-long process developing the film (6:16) and the inspiration he’s taken from Georges Méliès (17:00) and Jacques Tati (19:07). Then, he reflects on the origin of how he became ‘Francis Ford Coppola’ (23:07), the irrepressible spirit he forged in childhood (26:34), and where he sees himself in films like The Godfather (33:17), Apocalypse Now (35:51), and Gardens of Stone (36:10). On the back-half, we unpack the parallels between the titular city of Megalopolis and Zoetrope Studios (42:35), his capacity to keep dreaming, even in the face of financial ruin (43:30), where he believes America is headed (49:04), and the lasting memory of his late wife, Eleanor (58:08)."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Sounding the Otherworld: On Bryn Chainey's Rabbit Trap. Weird Studies #197 (September 17, 2025) ["Bryn Chainey’s (new movie) Rabbit Trap is psychological horror in the tradition of Repulsion, Jacob’s Ladder, and Angel Heart. But it is more: a metaphysical film exploring the mystery of sound and the Otherworld of Faerie—an excursion into that weird country, so deftly explored by Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where wonder and terror perform their eldritch duets.']
Frost, Mark. "Mark Frost Founds Twin Peaks." MUBI Podcast (September 18, 2025) ["“These girls are jam packed with secrets,” said David Lynch about the women of TWIN PEAKS. Why did characters such as Audrey Horne and Shelly Johnson get viewers so hot and bothered? TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost explains. LADIES OF LYNCH explores the subversive female characters created by the late David Lynch, and the singular women who helped shape them. Season 9’s guests include celebrated actor and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini; Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch; his producer of more than 30 years, Sabrina Sutherland; TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost; and the award-winning novelist Deborah Levy."]
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"AMOUR is an accessible story of great simplicity… Haneke has cast two legends of the French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, as Georges and Anne, an octogenarian couple, former music teachers, living in happy, companionable retirement. But one day Anne suffers a stroke… she declines into dementia, and we follow Georges's increasingly unbearable task of caring for his wife in their apartment… The power and intelligence of this film really is a marvel; it is superbly acted and directed, with the edge of cold steel that audiences have come to expect from Haneke but with something else: a tenderness, gentleness and compassion." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
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There are many Denzel struts—the ones that make you straighten up in your own seat (see Malcolm X), the ones so chilly they leave frost in his footprints (see American Gangster), the ones that prompt all sorts of hollers to all sorts of lawds (see Mississippi Masala or Inside Man). None of them, though, are quite as mean-spirited, houndish, or just plain predacious as Alonzo Harris’s Training Day stride. A dastardly pattern of movement, innately and meticulously constructed, each step translates, roughly, to a challenge: Try me.
For most of the film, no one does. You understand why, without a word. So, yes, there’s more to the sculpting of Denzel’s most villainous turn—the bravado, the frightfulness, the comedic acrobatics, the sheer irrepressible charisma—but it’s all synthesized, here, within this gait. Before “King Kong ain’t got shit on me” and unconsenting sherm hits, there was one foot in front of the other, and another after that. The secret, in this way, to Denzel’s greatest 21st-century performance is that he walked so that he could run. How else would you know where the threat was coming from? —Pryor
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"Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner play academics enlisted by the military to make contact when alien spacecraft land on Earth in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama… How refreshing to watch an alien contact movie in which no cities are destroyed or monuments toppled, and no adversarial squabbling distracts the human team from the challenges of their complex interspecies encounter. Anchored by an internalized performance from Amy Adams rich in emotional depth, this is a grownup sci-fi drama that sustains fear and tension while striking affecting chords on love and loss… ARRIVAL boldly snubs the standard alien-invasion vernacular of contemporary movies to explore a mood and language of its own. It may be a touch too subdued for the mainstream, but the movie has brains and originality, qualities these days too seldom valued in the genre." - David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
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"The first film in eight years from the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien is an immaculate treasure box of light, texture and movement – though just when you think you’ve pinned it down, it slips your grasp as nimbly as its lead character darting through a silver birch grove. For the first time in his estimable 35-year career, Hou has made a wuxia, or period martial-arts film… If you’ve seen swordsmen and/or women bouncing through a bamboo forest, you’ve seen wuxia – yet you’ve almost certainly never seen it carried off with this degree of delicacy and refinement. There’s a little forest-bouncing here, but the fight scenes are few and far between." - Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
"I didn’t expect to be as taken as I was. [Michael] Fried’s books are sometimes obsessively focused on quite esoteric propositions about a specific painting or photograph, but perhaps because of that are often spellbinding. I never thought I’d sit through 45 minutes of silent footage of Zidane running across a soccer field and come away enthralled, or find myself standing in front of a wall for hours thinking about the direction a figure is facing in a seventeenth-century painting or a 21st-century photograph. Fried can get carried away: once you see the absorption-theatricality distinction, it becomes tempting to see it everywhere. But even if it is not everywhere, it is in a lot of places. And once I started rereading Houellebecq, it was there too.
Fried’s basic insight is as follows: If you look at the tradition of high European art painting (he then expands to photography and novels), you will notice that many paintings seek to show figures as if they were not aware of being looked at by an audience. This could come through absorption in work, such as artisanal craftsmanship, or immersion in sociality with others. But in any case, the figures are oriented away from the audience, and pulled into the distinct world of the painting. This “pulling in” is crucial, since it sets up the painting as somehow standing outside and beyond our own wishes, with its own inner solidity. Because it pulls them away from us and into it, the figures and their world become objects that we look at and learn from, not mere projections of our desires.
And yet, they are inescapably there to be looked at by us. This fact means that in one way or another the painting must acknowledge that its scenes were created to be part of a scene, and therefore the figures are never fully independent of some kind of performance for their imagined audience. The independence they gain through being pulled into the inner world of the painting is taken back through being drawn back to their dependence for their existence on the desires of their audience. In Fried’s interpretation, this dependence shows up in subtle indications, such as a playing card turned outward toward the viewer, or one figure who breaks the spell of the absorbing scene to look out of the painting’s scene into the eye of the beholder.
What makes this relationship between theatricality and absorption especially potent is that it is not only descriptive but dynamic. It is an engine that drives artistic creativity, and much of Fried’s criticism is devoted to examining escalating attempts to deal with it. The most important dynamic involves various efforts to defeat the threat of theatricality and mannerism. This can happen in many ways, and no doubt many more will be discovered. One variant involves representations of figures caught up in war and violence: What could be more absorbing than that? There is no time to look away in the midst of battle. This is Fried’s interpretation of Jacques-Louis David, for example. Another variant is depictions of simple peasants, lost in everyday activities such as picking crops, oblivious to anything else but the task at hand. This is Fried’s interpretation of Millet’s The Gleaners.
But that very escalating depiction of violence or simplicity is unstable, in Fried’s reading. They inevitably become cliché and overdone, oscillating between shock for shock’s sake as the demands for the intensity of violence become greater on the one hand, and the brutalization and oversimplification of uneducated lower classes or nonintellectuals becomes too overt to ignore. In this and similar cases, the artist’s independence is the one threatened by theatricality. The peasants or soldiers may be absorbed in their work in the fields or bloody battles, but only an attention-seeking artist would put them in large-format canvases in front of crowds of the bourgeois public as a surefire way to gain their applause.
The dialectic begins anew, and artists begin finding ways to defeat the impression that they are painting in order to be seen painting but are themselves absorbed in the world of the painting as it unfolds, as if on its own, beyond their will. Fried takes this thought very far and in many directions, but his book on Courbet develops it directly. Courbet, in his view, hits on a very potent technique, which involves dispersing his own artistic consciousness throughout the painting, creating an impression that he is everywhere in it, and therefore somehow has merged with each and every aspect of it. In that way, the audience sees the painting and the painter immersed in it all at once.
This too ultimately proves unstable, in ways I will not get into now, eventually leading to the undoing from within of this line of painting in Manet. The last point I do want to emphasize is that while Fried often highlights painterly concerns around how to represent absorbed figures and defeat the impression of mannerism, this concern has roots in a conviction that the desire for some kind of absorption is present in the culture. Here too he has a point. Think of Charlie Kaufman films, such as Adaptation. These are animated by the sense that “we” have lost the ability to have intense, unmediated direct experience, that we are always somehow, even in the most seemingly intimate moments, acting with a view to how it will look to somebody else: how it will play on your feed, in the article you might write, in the story you might tell at a party.
Taken far enough, this thought leads to a kind of lament with language itself and a corresponding desire for prelinguistic immersion in instincts. But we don’t have to go so far to get the point. Just think of moments when you have felt like the line between you and the world disappeared: running down a hill so fast you can’t think but just must react; working on an essay and looking up two hours later as if it were no time at all; laughing with family and friends as each says exactly the right next thing that everybody understands without having to make any inferences; escaping or inflicting violence; and, yes, orgasm. The larger point behind Fried’s project is twofold: that painters try to depict absorption because this is how to absorb audiences who crave that very absorption, but that this very act creates the self-reinforcing oscillation between victories for theatricality and momentary reclamations of absorption." - Dan Silver
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