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Dec 23, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Leonardo Goi
“My films are, in the beginning, a sort of large area, like a geography,” Robert Kramer told critic Bernard Eisenschitz in 1997, “…and I don’t know where I’m going.”1 Anyone mildly familiar with the American maverick’s oeuvre will recognize the feeling: his own putative disorientation behind the camera sounds like the kind you experience while watching his works unfurl on the screen.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Leonardo Goi
Neither failure nor magnum opus, Francis Ford Coppola’s ahistorical epic pushes us to think beyond simplistic binaries. Leaving the Cannes premiere of Megalopolis (2024) earlier this year, I remember a few friends and colleagues asking if I’d liked it. Truth is, I didn’t know; a few months later, I still don’t. There were things that felt outright puzzling—the clunky dialogue, the nonsensical storylines, the campy excess of it all.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Leonardo Goi
According to its website, Omnes Films wants to “fill a void” in modern cinema.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
thefilmstage.com | Leonardo Goi
With just three features to his name, Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of small-town America. His 2019 debut, Ham on Rye, tracked a gaggle of high school seniors as they geared up for prom night and life away from home. Shot by Taormina’s regular cinematographer, Carson Lund, the film heralded two motifs that would haunt the director’s cinema.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
filmmakermagazine.com | Leonardo Goi
Back to selectionby Leonardo Goi in Directors, Festivals & Events, Interviews, Screenwriterson Sep 27, 2024 Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, Pepe There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
filmmakermagazine.com | Leonardo Goi
Back to selectionby Leonardo Goi in Director Interviews, Directors, Festivals & Events, Interviewson Sep 25, 2024 Neo Sora, Venice Film Festival 2024 “Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
filmmakermagazine.com | Leonardo Goi
Back to selectionby Leonardo Goi in Festivals & Eventson Sep 19, 2024 April, Baby Invasion, Brady Corbet, Cloud, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Familiar Touch, Happyend, Harmony Korine, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Neo Sora, Sarah Friedland, Siew Hua Yeo, Stranger Eyes, The Brutalist, Venice Film Festival 2024 I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Leonardo Goi
Some of the festival’s best—“Familiar Touch,” “The Room Next Door,” “April,” “The Brutalist”—shared a belief in cinema’s power to mesmerize. The first film I saw on the Lido this year wasn’t a feature but a twenty-minute VR project: Mammary Mountain. Playing in the Venice Immersive sidebar, and directed by Tara Baoth Mooney, Camille C. Baker, and Maf’j Alvarez, it promised an “embodied haptic experience” of breast cancer treatment, as remembered by a few survivors.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
filmmakermagazine.com | Leonardo Goi
Back to selectionby Leonardo Goi in Directors, Interviews, Screenwriterson Sep 10, 2024 Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
thefilmstage.com | Leonardo Goi
Fielding questions about Kubi, a period piece chronicling a few years of internecine feudal wars in 16th-century Japan, Takeshi Kitano dismissed some rumors he’d stoked. The film wasn’t going to be his last, as he’d previously suggested.
