How had I never seen...“While You Were Sleeping”?

by Cláudio Alves

Some films prove their greatness by challenging the audience. Some engage the mind, others spellbind the senses, immersing those who watch them in formalistic dreams of celluloid and digital beauty. Abrasive, cerebral, immersive, cinema can be a wonder, but we shouldn't suppose there's a single path to cinematic glory.

Don't get me wrong, I love my slow cinema, my European art-house hits, and Philosophical reveries. To cry with Carol is magic, to wander through Stalker's desolation is like dreaming with open eyes and to see New York, New York is to applaud its spectacle of ambition. But a cinephile can yearn for simple pleasures, too. Sometimes, one just wants to forget life's troubles and escape, to enjoy the goofiness of a nice comedy or the sweetness of an impossible romance. Sometimes, one just needs a hug.

And I've only just discovered that While You Were Sleeping (1995) fulfills that need with the warmest of embraces…

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The Look of "Joker"

by Cláudio Alves

In 1989, Tim Burton envisioned Gotham City as an Expressionistic nightmare, something necessarily unreal. Three years later, Batman Returns showed a different sort of urban reverie, one tainted by quasi fascistic imagery, an appropriate dark meaning for a darker film than its predecessor. Joel Schumacher's sequels would see Gotham go through another transfiguration, from a gloomy nightmare into a candy-colored hallucination. This process of growing artificiality would end when Christopher Nolan revitalized Batman for a 21st-century audience.

Nolan's trilogy shows us a Gotham that's a foreigner's idea of an American metropolis and one can almost chart, throughout the films, how the city goes from being a dream of Chicago to New York City 2.0. Todd Phillips' Joker perpetuates this configuration of Gotham as DC Comics' version of Manhattan, but he isn't looking to the real contemporary city for inspiration. The film is set in a New York of yore, a fantasy built from nostalgia and the cinematic legacy of New Hollywood's urban dramas. Gotham is never just a city, rather the idea of one…

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TIFF: "Atlantics" haunts and hypnotizes

by Nathaniel R

Atlantics made history earlier this summer when it became the first film directed by a black woman ever to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Though it lost the top prize Atlantics was a winner generating a lot of "must-see" buzz and eventually taking the Grand Jury Prize. Given that reception Netflix swept in to snatch it up for future streaming. Now that it has a home we wonder if it can continue to make waves, if you'll pardon the oceanic pun.

On the one hand it'd surely be tough to convince people to see a Senagalese movie without any easy summary or hook from a debut director. In that regard we're thankful Atlantics has a future firmly in place. On the other that futures is a double edged sword. As with Roma before it, which was also light on dialogue and rested on great cinematography and a brand new actress playing a quiet passive protagonist, its considerable strengths are entirely cinematic. Memorable images abound with clever lighting choices and a robust but never gaudy color palette. Atlantics bold and unsubtle sound will transfer with greater ease to in-home viewing with the constant roar of the ocean competing with an intrusive but sometimes inspired 80s influenced electronic score...

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Yes No Maybe So: Greta Gerwig's "Little Women"

by Eurocheese

Greta Gerwig's follow up to the brilliant Lady Bird looks like a potential Christmas smash hit waiting to happen. Can it stick the landing with such high expectations? Well, if the trailer is any indicator, we may be in for a treat. The Yes No Maybe So™ breakdown follows after the jump...

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April Foolish Predictions #5: Visual Categories

[drumroll] Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions continue

"Nomadland" was shot by the cinematographer of "The Rider"

We always mention at the start of all this that we call them April Foolish predictions because it's foolish to assume we know anything at all quite yet. Oscar buzz begins the day of announcement for projects with "pedigree" but the reality of the Oscar race is much more complex than that as the quality of films, size of campaigns, box office results, media pets, and public perception all end up weighing in later in the year. So consider these early bird predictions as "what ifs"... we do not pretend to have the year figured out just yet as we're going on hunches...

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