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AnOther •

A Guide to Kabuki Theatre in Film

When Kokuho picked up a single nomination – for best hair and make-up – at this year’s Academy Awards, it was a surprise. But the Japanese epic, which follows the coming-of-age and career of a fictional actor (Ryo Yoshizawa) adopted by a legendary theatre star (Ken Watanabe) after his father was killed by rival yakuza, had already become the highest-grossing live-action film of all time in Japan. It's easy to see how a story of fraternal rivalry, betrayal and redemption set in the highest echelo...
The Guardian •

Strength in numbers: what have 50 years of labor union documentaries shown us?

“We better start pulling together or, by God, they’re going to bury us,” says a meat packer during a union meeting in Barbara Kopple’s 1990 documentary American Dream. It’s a desperate plea for survival; “they” are the Hormel Foods Corporation, who took advantage of union disorder to replace a huge portion of their workforce during a costly strike. American Dream sees the 1985-86 labor crisis in Austin, Minnesota, as symbolic of the state of organized labor in the United States – call it an alte...
Inverse •

Netflix's 'Man on Fire' Is A Dimmer Remake Of A Tony Scott Classic

John Creasy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is in dire need of a lifeline. Once an incredibly skilled Special Forces Mercenary, Creasy lost his entire team on a risky mission in Mexico City, and their deaths weigh heavily on his conscience — the intensity of his PTSD makes him sleep with a bag on his head, as if to deny the senses and memory of the world around him. Since the publication of A.Q. Quinnell’s 1980 thriller novel, John Creasy has been the “man on fire,” but before he’s thrust back into the...
Glasgow Film Theatre •

Programme Notes: Rose of Nevada

The first minute of Rose of Nevada (Dir. Mark Jenkin, 2025) doesn’t feel like it reveals a lot, but it is rich with detail. Jenkin, who shot and edited the film, in addition to writing and directing it, cuts between close-ups of fishing dock detritus – limp, rusted, and chipped objects each sporting a unique sense of abandonment. We are in an unnamed Cornish town that is unmistakably on its last legs; as we learn from scenes beyond these up-close-and-personal looks at coastal artefacts, the post office is now a boarded-up food bank, the lone pub is eerily, depressingly quiet, and the docks see absolutely no fishing business.
AnOther •

Five Groundbreaking Dream Sequences From Silent Cinema

When Gerald Fox attended a film studies course taught by renowned scholar Vlada Petrić, he was struck by the late Harvard professor’s essay Film & Dreams. The essay offered a survey of the “oneiric style” – a style that evoked the sensation and substance of dreams – that flourished in silent cinema. Decades’ worth of early 20th century films were analysed through “the prism of dreams”. As surrealist master Luis Buñuel put it, “Dreams are the first cinema invented by mankind.”
Later in his career...
TIME •

The True Story Behind #Skyking and the Airline Worker Who Flew a Stolen Plane Over the Pacific Northwest

As a ground service agent, the 28-year-old had neither a pilot’s license nor any flying experience or training. He was not a domestic terrorist, didn’t plan to use the aircraft to cause civilian casualties, and had no political agenda. As Russell says in the final section of the ATC recording, he was “just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess.” As explored in the new documentary, now streaming on Hulu after premiering at the South by Southwest Film Festival last month, Russell, who suff...
Inverse •

45 Years Ago, A Polarizing Director Revived His Career With An All-Time Fantasy Epic Classic

By 1981, John Boorman was in dire need of creative rebirth. The British director had made a name for himself first with the stylish revenge thriller Point Blank, and then especially with Deliverance, a thriller set in the dangerous Georgian wilderness that was a major box office success and picked up three Academy Award nominations. The rest of the 1970s wasn’t so hot — after a failed attempt to adapt Lord of the Rings, Boorman made the Sean Connery-starring post-apocalyptic fantasy Zardoz, whic...
Letterboxd •

Run the Story: 50 years of All the President’s Men, the undefeated journalism thriller • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine

All the President’s Men opens with perhaps the most aggressive use of a typewriter in cinematic history, an extreme close-up of ink being stamped onto flecked carbon paper to establish the date: “June 1, 1972.”
Watergate, the soon-to-become-infamous incident in which five men were arrested after attempting to wiretap the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., wouldn’t take place until June 17—just over two weeks later. But the intensity of...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Untold: Chess Mates'

But as revealed in Chess Mates—the latest installment in Netflix’s Untold anthology docuseries about scandals and wild stories in sports—things have changed significantly since the days of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. The documentary unpacks the rivalry between Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who for 15 years has been ranked No. 1 in the world (but who has not competed in the World Chess Championship since 2022), and Hans Niemann, a young American player considered an outsider who achi...
Inverse •

47 Years Later, One Ambitious Stephen King Thriller Just Got A Huge Upgrade

Stephen King’s first novel is only around 200 pages; his follow-up Salem’s Lot is closer to 500. King’s sophomore novel, about a writer returning to a small Maine town from his childhood only to discover the townspeople are turning into vampires, is by no means his longest effort (hello, It and The Stand), but it was long enough that producer Richard Kobritz smartly decided to adapt it as a miniseries rather than a straightforward film, like director Brian De Palma did with Carrie in 1976.In rec...
AnOther •

La Grazia, a Sentimental Political Drama from Paolo Sorrentino

Neapolitan filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has many recurring themes and motifs – beauty, loneliness, tradition, electronic music, sensuality as a window into the soul, often all bound up within a single protagonist. But he has one true acting muse – Toni Servillo, who shares with Sorrentino a Naples birthplace and a fascination with the conscience of powerful Italian men.
“[Sorrentino] gave me a real present [of] seven beautiful, wonderful characters,” says Servillo. It’s the day after the Venice Fi...
TIME •

The Surprising History Behind The Bride!

“I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.”So commands the Creature to his creator Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel. The Creature thinks his suffering can only cease if it is replicated in another, and expresses this desire through possessive, dehumanizing language. His companion must be female becaus...
AV Club •

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man fast-forwards to WWII for a superfluous finale

At the end of Peaky Blinders‘ sixth season, Birmingham gangster Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) finally found grace. Not to be confused with his late wife and lost love Grace (Annabelle Wallis) from the first three seasons—rather, in the most recent moments of the BBC series, it seemed Tommy had stumbled onto inner peace. He’s about to commit one more murder when he hears the bells tolling to mark the eleventh hour on Armistice Day. “Peace at last,” he says. For a traumatized veteran of the First...
Inverse •

One Forgotten Japanese Sci-Fi Movie Predated A Beloved Anime Adaptation By Decades

The films of Nobuhiko Obayashi are a particularly satisfying and surprising niche in Japanese cinema. His filmography is bookended with dazzling works that combine the exuberance of adolescence with discoveries of historic suffering — beginning with House in 1977, and concluding with Hanagatami in 2017 and Labyrinth of Cinema, which released months after the director’s demise in 2020.During the 1980s, Obayashi directed several adaptations of sci-fi books and travelogues for entertainment conglom...
AV Club •

When Pixar filmmakers venture into live-action, the Brain Trust goes bust

In the years that the filmgoing world has tried to pin down the secret to animation giant Pixar’s success, a few frontrunners have emerged as possibilities. First, there’s the Brain Trust, the company’s collaborative, rigorous development process that lets senior creatives periodically contribute to their peers’ ongoing projects. Next, there are its 22 Rules For Storytelling, each one a satisfying and sensible maxim for narrative design that helps partially explain why Pixar’s first run of films...
BFI •

Zi review: Kogonada’s return to indie filmmaking

A Hong Kong violinist grapples with visions of her future self in a meandering drama where resonant moments are few and far between.Kogonada’s zi is light on its feet and unbound by narrative convention, a film that feels like a direct reaction to the director’s most recent film, the earnest, studio-funded A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), which was widely panned by critics upon release last year. The former video essayist filmmaker renders Hong Kong as a site of almost sublime anonymity, whe...
AnOther •

Wagner Moura Is Making Oscars History with The Secret Agent

Wagner Moura makes no bones about what in the world makes him angry. The star of The Secret Agent, and first Brazilian to be nominated for a best actor Academy award, is the face of the fury and compassion coursing through the simmering political thriller from Kleber Mendonça Filho, set amid the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s.
“My temperature in life is more explosive when it’s about injustice,” Moura tells me when we sit down to talk at the London Film Festival in October, months...
Inverse •

The Legendary Epic That Inspired 'Dune' Just Got A Huge Upgrade

The truest, purest way to watch Lawrence of Arabia — David Lean’s historical epic about British officer T.E. Lawrence fighting in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire — is projected on 70mm. The landscapes, the colors, and the striking intimacy of tortured souls against a backdrop of tremendous desert beauty are what the large-format film gauge is best at. But as we’re not all lucky enough to know a guy who can project it for us whenever we feel like it, a 4K Blu-ray is the next best thing...
In Review Online •

Everybody to Kenmure Street — Felipe Bustos Sierra [Sundance '26 Review] | In Review Online

In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13, a unit from the UK Home Office’s immigration enforcement taskforce staged a dawn raid on Kenmure Street that abducted two Sikh men — longtime residents of the area — and ferried them into their van. This is as far as the “prisoner removal service” ever got, as locals quickly milled onto the street to livestream and protest the deportati...
In Review Online •

Ghost in the Machine — Valerie Veatch [Sundance '26 Review] | In Review Online

Every threat to a sane and healthy life posed by AI is a continuation of some already existing social and political deterioration. Our societal tipping point from AI skepticism to acceptance (or, helplessness) was only fluid because our lives have already become so siloed, automated, and precarious. Technocapitalism decided humans are most valuable as a mass expression of processed, packaged, sellable data, a sea of targets for gambling ads and unmanned drones alike; everything deplorable about...
BFI •

10 great British heist films

As the Scorsese and Tarantino-endorsed British crime thriller Strongroom is re-released in cinemas, we break open the history of the British heist film and make off with the goods.A Saturday shift at a suburban English bank draws to a close. The bank manager and cashier are surprised by robbers, their features contorted and smeared by tights pulled over their heads. They break into the strongroom, nicking the loot and locking the two bystanders inside. The bank won’t reopen until Tuesday, but th...
AnOther •

A Guide to the Searching Cinema of Richard Linklater

It’s been 40 years since Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, beginning his crusade to make scrappy, personal, romantic and boisterous cinema. It’s fitting for a director who first broke out in the 1990s “Indiewood” boom that his latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is an origin story of cinema’s enfant terrible par excellence, Jean-Luc Godard, mounting his iconic debut film Breathless. As Linklater’s first non-English film, Nouvelle Vague feels like a film fanatic has staged and animated...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'The Big Fake'

At the start of The Big Fake, a Netflix dramatization of one criminal’s involvement in the most tumultuous events in post-war Italy, Toni Chichiarelli (Pietro Castellitto) is a talented painter living hand-to-mouth as a portrait artist on the streets of Rome. It’s the 1970s, deep in Italy’s “Years of Lead," an era of turmoil marked by political terrorism by neo-fascists and far-left militants like the “Red Brigades,” not to mention interference from the Italian state and profiteering from organi...
AV Club •

The Bone Temple's villain makes an existential struggle for survival blandly literal

Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) arrived in a postscript cliffhanger to last summer‘s 28 Years Later dressed in the tacky, eyesore garb—tracksuit, wig, and plastic jewelry—instantly recognizable to British audiences as an homage to Jimmy Savile, the media personality and philanthropist who was exposed as one of Britain’s most prolific sexual predators after his death in 2011. This completely unpredictable coda—a promise of what was to come in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple—triggered a fl...
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