UK acting union Equity has joined SAG-AFTRA in condemning Eline Van der Velden’s AI-generated Tilly Norwood after the creator insisted that talent agencies were interested in the “actress.” Equity’s audio and new media organizer Shannon Sailing said, “Tilly is not an actress. She is an AI tool. Or it is an AI tool… made up of performers’ work.”
"In the wake of the critical and commercial success of One Battle After Another (2025), conservative pundits have denounced Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film as an irresponsible ode to ideological violence. “You can make excuses for it, but basically the [film is] an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism,” said Ben Shapiro. In The National Review, Armond White writes that “Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present.”
"Diane Keaton has died at 79. The American actress began her career on the stage as an understudy in the original Broadway production of Hair (1968). She received a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress for her supporting role in Woody Allen’s production of Play It Again, Sam (1969). In the 1970s, she rose to prominence with a string of acclaimed film performances in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), as well as in six of Allen’s films, including her Oscar-winning turn as the eponymous Annie Hall (1977). Keaton garnered some of the strongest notices of her career for her performance as Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty’s historical epic Reds (1981). In the 1990s, she reunited with Coppola and Allen for The Godfather: Part III (1990) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), respectively, and scored box-office success with comedies Father of the Bride (1991) and The First Wives Club (1996). With Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and The Family Stone (2005), Keaton proved herself to be both an enduring screen presence, and very few years passed without an acting credit to her name. “A few days ago the world was a place that included Diane Keaton,” remembered Allen. “Now it’s a world that does not. Hence, it’s a drearier world. Still, there are her movies. And her great laugh still echoes in my head.”"
... Eurocentrism ... is the view that enshrines the hierarchical stratifications inherited from Western colonial domination, assumed to be inevitable and even "progressive." Eurocentrism does not refer to Europe in its literal sense as a continent or a geopolitical unit but rather to an intellectual orientation rooted in colonial power, an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes, that perceives Europe (and the neo-Europes around the world) as universally normative (4). - Stam, Robert. Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics. Wiley/Blackwell, 2015.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Everard, Faith. "Gate of Flesh." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["We are only temporarily set at ease by the opening shots of Suzuki Seijun’s explosive, avant-garde Nikutai no mon (Gate of Flesh, 1964), in which pristine skyscrapers and bleary-eyed sunsets quickly give way to utter carnage. Welcome – and beware! warns the inscription on the gate our heroine stumbles through, as a commotion nearby centres a poorly disguised cadaver: “Clear the path! Dead man coming through!” we are cautioned. This is the hellscape of postwar Tokyo."]
Lee, Soowhan. "A Decision to Leave, Yet Never to Part." Film Matters (October 23, 2025) ["Park Chan-wook is the director behind Oldboy, Thirst, and The Handmaiden, comparable to Bong Joon-ho. Whenever his new feature film is released, people jokingly – yet with a sense of expectation — ask, “Who’s going to die this time?” This demonstrates how unique and consistent Park’s cinematic universe is. However, his films also start with a simple, sensational opening. Inside that, human instinct, morality, desire, and guilt clash. Additionally, he constantly urges the audience to reflect on his message. Decision to Leave (2022) is Park’s eleventh feature film, and audiences were surprised by his new cinematic style. Many of Park’s fans choose this film as their favorite among his works. This movie, which could be seen as a watershed moment in his career, is a melodrama that explores the depths of people’s hearts without relying on provocative scenes. Still, I would prefer to call it a love story. "]
Loayza, Beatrice. "Sisters of Sacrilege." The Current (September 25, 2025) ["Religion relies on the formless logic of faith—belief that is felt in spite of tangible proof telling us otherwise—which the nuns of nunsploitation cinema routinely toy with to serve their own purposes. Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021)—which features a dildo carved to resemble the Virgin Mary, sensuous dream sequences of a jacked Jesus, and sapphic sex scenes on sacred grounds—understands this particularly well. If “God is not bound by a rule book,” as its rabble-rousing heroine, Benedetta (Virginie Efira), declares, then he’s also open to interpretation, his laws capable of being determined by mere human whims. Is Benedetta really perceiving divine signals, or is she faking her hallucinations to leverage her position in the Church? If the scene when Benedetta slices open her wrists to simulate the stigmata tells us she’s a fraud, her full-body commitment to the act tells us, at the very least, that the stakes are real. Nuns like Benedetta wager nothing less than their own bodies knowing that pain and pleasure are just two sides of the same coin. In nunsploitation, there is no such thing as good or bad girls. To paraphrase Linda Williams, these parameters remain, but within them our naughty nuns renegotiate their terms in liberating ways: good girls can pretend they don’t want to be pleasured; bad girls can pretend they don’t want to be punished. With a twinkle in their eyes, they’ll find holy release."]
Masciotra, David. "Why Honey Don't Is the Subversive Queer Private Eye Movie for Today's America." Crimereads (October 25, 2025) ["While having a lesbian in the role of protagonist separates Honey Don’t from its male-led influences, there is yet another connection to make. Joseph Hansen’s groundbreaking, rollicking, and often moving series of novels about David Brandsetter, a gay insurance agent investigating claims in a similarly downtrodden California throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, shares the “queer world” of Honey Don’t, and presents the sexuality of the hero as an asset, rather than a liability. It enables Brandsetter, as it does Honey, to navigate professional and underground circles, often identifying characteristics and vices that elude the eyes of the detective who lives solely within the staid center of mainstream Americana. Because of the vicious homophobia of the 1970s, and the HIV-AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s, Brandsetter’s gay identity is very much a big deal. Honey Don’t, even if it greets audience amidst a reactionary backslide in American politics, measures the progress that enables storytellers to create queer characters without explanation, apology, or tragedy. "]
Schobert, Christopher. "Recommended New Books on Filmmaking: The Mighty Clint, Abel Ferrara, Reapprasing Ed Wood, Jonathan Demme & More." The Film Stage (October 20, 2025)
Yacavone, Peter. "Branded to Kill." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["A case study of a man who is willing to die for his shoddy principles, Branded to Kill is precisely what its most distinguished admirers – Hasumi Shigehiko, Tony Rayns – have denied: a profoundly philosophical and ethical film comparable to Kurosawa Akira’s great triptych of Rashōmon (1950), Ikiru (To Live, 1952), and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954). It asks, as they do, simply, “How to live”? Suitably enough for a film directed by a dissolute naval veteran and scripted by a cadre of young radicals, Branded to Kill puts the question in a negative form: “What is worth dying for?”: and then signals its orientation by reverting to 30 seconds of negative film exposure during a sequence in which the protagonist awaits his probable doom. What is worth dying for? It is a question that in post-war Japan had a kind of retrospective urgency to it, since hundreds of thousands of wartime soldiers, seamen, and pilots had rushed to their deaths chanting the “mantras” of Yamamoto Tsunetomo and other philosophers who advocated for the ethical and spiritual supremacy of self-willed death. Suzuki’s characters, as they relate to this central question, are almost Brechtian in their ideological purity. "]
Zoller, Debbie. "Debbie Zoller Drives Lost Highway." MUBI Podcast (October 16, 2025) ["Makeup and prosthetics artist Debbie Zoller first worked with David Lynch on Lost Highway (1997). She discusses their two decades of friendship and how she designed the looks for some of his most iconic femme fatales."]
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Written by Paddy Chayefsky (Network) and directed by Ken Russell (Women in Love), Altered States (1980), starring William Hurt as a psychopathologist seeking to unlock primal secrets, is “a textbook example of how a tug of war between writer and director can work in the film’s favor,” writes Budd Wilkins at Slant. “Perhaps it is oversimplistic to map out the movie’s split personality in terms of a battle between Chayefsky’s cerebralism and Russell’s corporeality,” writes Jessica Kiang. “But it’s also fun, so let’s indulge,” and she does. Altered States is “a series of bad trips burned from the brain onto celluloid,” writes Jacob Oller at the A.V. Club, but “the undeniable revelation sought by its fringe-dweller is the same as the one found in hackneyed romances—sometimes you just need to turn yourself into the universe’s throbbing fetus before you realize that we find our answers in each other.”"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment