TIFF '24: "The End" of the World is a Marvelous Musical Mess

by Cláudio Alves

Ambitious mess will always be more exciting and artistically valuable than cautious mediocrity. The timid filmmaker has their place, but they'll never rise above those whose ideas reach for the sky, the heavens, the likely impossible. Or, in Joshua Oppenheimer's case, those who burrow down below, digging to the center of the Earth, mayhap to hell. For his feature debut, The End, the director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence goes underground, setting the scene in a not-so-distant future when the Earth has been left ravaged by climate change and other related catastrophes, virtually inhabitable, so hostile to life that those who survive must fight one another for the scant resources around…

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TIFF '24: The Art of Dying in One's Own Terms

by Cláudio Alves

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR won the Golden Lion on the same day it first screened at TIFF.
Whether programmed with that intention or bonded by coincidence, one can often find films in conversation at festivals. Echoed themes and varied approaches to the same idea occur, often across sections, tying works together that were never meant to be considered in those terms. Some might disagree, but I find it to be a valuable experience, oft conducive to deeper thought, comparison and contrast. At this year's TIFF, for example, mortality was on many an artist's mind, from Godard, knowingly at the end of his rope, to the apocalyptic visions of Oppenheimer, Ostrikov, and Thibault Emin. From Cannes, there came meditations from Cronenberg and Schrader, films laden with grief, loss, and the need to take control. In documentary land, there are the recollections of an erstwhile death row inmate in The Freedom of Fierro.

Still, the most apparent conversation partners were two Spanish filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar and Carlos Marques-Marcet, telling two euthanasia stories in The Room Next Door and They Will Be Dust…

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Venice '24: "The Room Next Door"

By Elisa Guidici

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

There’s no living storyteller with a more profound, intimate understanding of death than Pedro Almodóvar. I call him a "storyteller" because, in the 2020s, that’s become his most defining identity. His first English-language feature—set in an alternative, upper-class, hyper-cultural, Almodóvarian version of the United States—once again showcases his incredible narrative talents...

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Teknolust: Four Tildas is better than One

by Cláudio Alves

We live in a time when what was once conjecture is becoming a perilous reality, dreams of advanced tech crashing into the nightmare of actual artificial intelligence. Facing these newborn terrors of our digital age, the Criterion Channel looks back. Spanning fifty years of film history, a collection of 17 titles investigates how cineastes have approached the topic of AI, from decades when it was just narrative device or metaphor, to our present state of sci-fi as a direct response to concrete real-world anxieties.

This cinematic tasting menu of techno-cinema offers many gustative possibilities, though none more surprising than Lynn Hershman-Leeson's Teknolust. Criminally underseen upon its 2002/2003 release, the unorthodox comedy posits a scenario where Tilda Swinton plays four roles, mad scientist Rosetta Stone and her three cybernetic creations cum clones – Ruby, Marinne, and Olive…

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Queering the Oscars: The Costumes of "Orlando"

by Cláudio Alves

Sandy Powell's career has been closely tied to queer artistry since its genesis. After completing her education, the costume designer soon started collaborating with multi-hyphenated gay icon Lindsay Kemp whose stage work she had long admired, and, later, her jump from theater to film would be predicated on another queer genius, Derek Jarman. They'd work on four projects – Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, and Wittgenstein – and the costumer would continue, keeping his memory alive after the director's death in 1994. Since then, even as her profile grew into the mainstream, Powell remained faithful to the idea and ideals of queerness in cinema, often joining forces with artists under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, Todd Haynes most of all.

As Pride Month 2023 reaches its end, let's remember this Academy darlings' first brush with Oscar. It was in 1993 when Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando earned Sandy Powell a Best Costume Design nomination…

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