Review: Pietro Marcello's "Scarlet" is a picture out of time

by Cláudio Alves

Whether documentary or fiction, Pietro Marcello's films always convey the quality of artworks lost somewhere between modernity and an undefined past. 2019's much-lauded Martin Eden took this aspect to its peak, evoking the palpable authenticity of Neorealist cinema while playing fast and loose with history in its design. That film's relationship with the past circumvents reactionary nostalgia. The anachronistic scenography suggests an atemporal milieu, breaching the porous membrane separating the narrative's period and the viewer's sense of now. This further underlined the piece's political gestures, turning retrospective into a direct address. In comparison, Scarlet represents a more conventional object though it shares many qualities with its predecessor. 

Like Martin Eden, Scarlet is a literary adaptation looking back to Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The raw material is Alexander Grin's 1923 novella Scarlet Sails, once brought to the big screen by Soviet filmmaker Alexandr Ptushko. In Marcello's film, the Russian setting is transposed to rural Normandy…

Click to read more ...

Cannes at Home: Day 11 – A Tale of Two Realisms

by Cláudio Alves

Well, it's over. Another festival ends, and so does another edition of the Cannes at Home series. I've watched many a great film this past week and hope you have enjoyed the ride. To finish things off, it's time to consider the last two filmmakers to present their latest works at the Croisette. Alice Rohrwacher dazzled away with her La Chimera, starring a scruffy-looking Italian-speaking Josh O'Connor, and Ken Loach's The Old Oak proved as divisive as all his late-career films have been. 

This last Cannes at Home dispatch looks at these auteurs' greatest pictures, titles that crystalize the two distinct forms of realism each work within. There's Rohrwacher's magical spin on Italian neorealism with Happy as Lazzaro and Ken Loach's perpetuation of the kitchen-sink tradition of British social realism in Kes…

Click to read more ...

Reader's Choice: Hitchcock's Troubling Divisive "Marnie" (1964)

Each weekend Nathaniel we'll be discussing a movie requested by you! SPOILERS ahead so if you haven't screened this on Netflix do that first.

The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish.

Who is the most f***ed up character in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964)? The answer is not as simple as it appears. The titular ice queen blonde (Tippi Hedren) is sexually frigid, terrified of lightning, a compulsive liar, a serial thief, and disassociates almost instantly at the sight of the color red. She has so many issues she's a full series of crazy. But while Marnie is a loner she's hardly alone in her own film when it comes to needing serious amounts of therapy...

Click to read more ...

The haunting beauty of "Kwaidan"

by Cláudio Alves

This month, in the Criterion Channel, there's a spotlight on Kwaidan, the Masaki Kobayashi classic that became the first significant example of Japanese horror to reach international audiences. You can find critic Grady Hendrix exploring the 1964 anthology on the streaming service, but that's far from the only reason you should check it out. Kwaidan collects four ghost stories that, together, form cinematic poetry of ravishing beauty. No wonder Kobayashi's film has entranced The Film Experience for years. Dancin' Dan once wrote about Kwaidan for the Oscar Horrors series, Nathaniel and Juan Carlos discussed it in podcast form, and I highlighted its costuming for an idealized Oscar ballot. 

Still, it's never a wrong time to re-consider Kwaidan, to get lost anew in its visual splendor...

Click to read more ...

Best Picture in Black-and-White: 2022 Edition

by Cláudio Alves

Remember when Bong Joon-ho and NEON did a special re-release of Parasite in black-and-white? Since then, it's been an awards season tradition to imagine what the Academy's Best Picture nominees would look like devoid of color. This exercise is based chiefly on silly fun since there's more to black-and-white cinema than just turning the saturation dials down. However, it sometimes reveals exciting things about the films at hand. Whose cinematography relies the most on chromatic contrast? What picture would survive the best in monochrome, mayhap even excel? Last year, The Power of the Dog proved a silvery revelation, calling to mind midcentury revisionist westerns. Let's see if this batch of nominees includes a similar success…

Click to read more ...