Through Her Lens: 2016 (The 89th Oscars)

A series by Juan Carlos Ojano. Previous Episodes: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | Introduction / Explanation

This year at the Oscars marked a landmark in representation. Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight became the first Best Picture winner to star an all-Black cast and the first that was LGBTQ+-themed. This win was even more remarkable as the film went up against the heavily nominated frontrunner La La Land, a romantic musical. This year also marked an unprecedented amount of racial representation in the acting categories, with seven out of 20 nominees being non-White, two of them winning.

However, this considerable victory in diversity did not extend to gender. In the directing category  all the nominees were male. At the time, not much discourse and coverage was given to gender as the focus on representation was mostly around race, especially after the two-year run of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign...

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Cahiers du Cinéma chooses ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ as Best of the Decade

by Murtada Elfadl

Cahiers du Cinéma, the prestigious French film magazine, has selected David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return as the best film of the decade. By doing so it reignites the twin debate of what is cinema / what is TV. Those lines have been blurring with the advent of streaming. Obviously Lynch is one of cinema’s most respected auteurs and while Twin Peaks: The Return was shown on TV, it also debuted at the Cannes Film Festival.That is similar to The Irishman or Marriage Story from this season which also debuted at prestigous film festivals but their ultimate home is Netflix...

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Soundtracking: Toni Erdmann

by Chris Feil

Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann is one of the decade’s most exacting looks at depression and the human cost of the global corporate mindset. These two thematic points of view ebb and flow in and out of one another in the film as suddenly as the film’s comedy and tragedy do, showing the malaise of how we live today that’s symptomatic of impersonal capitalistic remove. It’s a state of being that is symbiotically personal and societal, desperately funny and deeply sad.

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The Top 100 Comedies: Screwball Dames and Male Auteurs

by Seán McGovern

The limit of list culture is the absolute bias of the person compiling it (except of course the Dewey Decimal System which is without imperfection). To compile theirs, the BBC polled 253 film critics - 118 women and 135 men -  from 52 countries to determine what exactly are the "100 Greatest Comedies".

It's good to look at these lists to remind ourselves that since the majority of films are made by men, so too is the work that's considered both the funniest and the best. Right-on caveat aside, some great, female-centred comedies make the list: 2016's Toni Erdmann at 59; Mean Girls, which we can now call a modern classic, at 57; and Clueless (iconic) at a very healthy 34...

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Dunham and Konner May Pen "Toni Erdmann" Remake

Robert here! Remember a few months ago when we all learned that Jack Nicholson was making a long-awaited return to the silver screen to star with Kristen Wiig in an American remake of bonkers German comedy Toni Erdmann? No, no, it was not a St. Elsewhere style coma dream. That possibly brilliant, possibly ill-advised project is still well underway, and there has been a new development: universally beloved and totally uncontroversial creator, writer, director, and star of HBO's Girls Lena Dunham and her co-writer Jenni Konner are in talks to pen the script. More after the jump...

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