Screen Anarchy

On the morning of August 22nd, 2023, eight young men, six of them still in school, climbed into a cable car to traverse a valley 900 feet above the remote foothills of Pakistan, a trip the young men took at least twice a day.   On that particular day, however, two of three cables snapped, leaving the tram, along with the eight young men inside, dangling precariously over the valley. Considering the remote location, scarcity of resources, and a fraying cable wire, rescue seemed, if not impossible, then highly improbable.    Via archival footage, some drone-based cameras, videos captured on cellphones, and, among others, news footage, talking head interviews with the interested parties, and dramatic recreations, writer-director Mohammed Ali Naqvi (The Accused: Damned or Devoted?,…

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On the occasion of receiving the European Lifetime Achievement Award at the 38th European Film Awards, Liv Ullmann reflects on cinema as legacy, moral responsibility and the enduring mystery of performance in a conversation that speaks directly to the ethical and artistic stakes of filmmaking today.

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Chandler Levack’s latest, the Canadian romcom Mile End Kicks, hit cinemas on April 17th. It will have its long awaited US premiere at SXSW before that. The film’s distributor Sumerian Pictures has sent out a whopper of a gallery of BTS images today. Travel back fiteen years, to 2011 Montreal, down below.    A 24-year-old music critic gets romantically involved with members of an indie band she decides to publicize, set against Montreal’s 2011 indie music scene.   From Director/Writer Chandler Levack and starring Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick, Stanley Simons, and Juliette Gariépy, MILE END KICKS hits theaters April 17, 2026.   From Chandler Levack, the acclaimed director of I Like Movies, comes her sophomore feature MILE END KICKS, which world premiered at TIFF and…

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Nearly three decades after its release, The Matrix remains as relevant as ever, and likely always will be. It’s one of my all-time favorite action films. When I first watched it, though, I was captivated less by its philosophy and more by the spectacle: Neo’s long black coat, chunky boots, dark glasses, and the effortless way he bent backward to dodge bullets. As the years passed, I gradually grasped the real meaning of the movie. Especially, a very minute detail that caught my eye when I was rewatching this film after 27 years was the Latin phrase ‘temet nosce’ hung inside the Oracle’s kitchen. She was one of the wisest characters who did not explicitly let Neo know that he is The One. She was…

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Variety has reported this morning that French sales outfit Charades has come on board the slasher horror sequel, In A Violent Nature 2, and will present it to buyers during EFM in Berlin.    The sequel … brings back Ry Barrett as Johnny, a vengeful, undead killer who embarks on a bloody rampage after a group of teens steal a golden locket that awakens his spirit. In the second film, Johnny heads to a summer camp, where he crosses paths with a young, outcast camper who is forced to spend the night with his counselor sister and her friends at their annual end-of-season party. Lucas Nguyen, Olivia Scriven, Laurie Babin, Fionn Laird, Donald MacLean Jr., and Evan Marsh complete the cast.   The sequel started…

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With Bazaar (Murder in the Building), Rémi Bezançon delivered the intended closing film of IFFR: a playful homage to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. One of Hitchcock’s finest films, Rear Window, is about watching, listening, and cinema itself. Photojournalist Jeff, accustomed to a wandering life, is confined to his home with a broken leg in a cast. Even more than by his injury, he is bound to his telephoto camera, used as he is to viewing the world through a lens. From his wheelchair he observes the apartments across the courtyard in Greenwich Village, New York, where he lives. Jeff is played by James Stewart, one of the most beloved actors of the 1940s and 1950s — the very period in which the story is set. In…

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Alice Rohrwacher reflects on her collaborative practice, myth-infused realism and the production realities shaping contemporary European auteur cinema.

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This year’s winner of the Audience Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam is I Swear, Kirk Jones’ biopic about John Davidson. To say it is a crowdpleaser is an understatement: from hundreds of votes, the film got a mean average of 4.8 out of 5. That means that on average, out of every five people, one voted a “4” (meaning good) and four voted a “5” (meaning excellent). So who is John Davidson and why is a film about him so popular? To answer the first question: John Davidson is a man in Scotland who suffers from the Syndrome of Gilles de la Tourette, or Tourette’s for short. It is a neurological disorder and means he has tics. Lots of tics. Bad ones. He…

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James C. Kirby was an intense man.   He lived not one life, but several: A priest of the Temple of Set, a hotel chef, a social worker for traumatized men, a craft jeweller, and the former owner of Canada’s largest occult book store. The latter of which he bartered for a large cache of 30,000-year-old Mammoth Ivory. He then became one of Yukon’s most celebrated carving artists.    When building a deck for his remote trailer, he went much further, and built an entire home around it, with the trailer still existing as the central heart of the abode. On the surface, Kirby looks like an olive skinned composite of Bruce Campbell and Michael Shannon, with perhaps a hint of Tommy Chong. He gives…

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A sadistic personal trainer kidnaps their client and puts them, and other captives, through punishing, often lethal workouts.

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