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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Chloe Walker |Ryan Swen
Director Wim Wenders often made films about journeying. Famed for his distinctly more pessimistic, European take on the American road movie form, Wenders regularly looked at journeys heading nowhere in films such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). In the 1980s, Wenders’ cinema went decidedly more fantastical, notably his beautiful 1987 angel drama Wings of Desire. The journey here isn’t simply across autobahns and cities but to realms beyond the Earth.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Chloe Walker |Adam Scovell |Ryan Swen |Jasper Sharp
John Grisham had two careers before becoming one of the best-selling novelists in American history – first as a trial lawyer, and then as a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives. His intimate knowledge of the law and of the South helped power his remarkable writing career, which began in 1989 with A Time to Kill. There have been nearly 50 bestsellers since then, between them shifting over 300 million copies.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Ryan Swen |Jasper Sharp |John Taylor |Cristina Lopez |Cristina Álvarez López
There is perhaps no greater example of the emergence of a specifically 21st-century cinephilia than Edward Yang. A vanguard member of the Taiwan New Cinema movement – which included among its ranks Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen and Ko I-chen – he made just seven feature films before his untimely death from cancer at the age of 59, and yet his impact looms large over world cinema, in spite of its long-term inaccessibility.
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2 months ago | 
variety.com | Ryan Swen |Guy Lodge
Of all of the phrases that could begin a light-hearted animated film, the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous is surely among the least likely. But “The Colors Within,” which opens with that plea for God to grant “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” is no ordinary animated film.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Emily Maskell |Stuart Isaac Burnside |Faye D. Effard |Ryan Swen
If you look at the career of any beloved filmmaker, their journey to cinematic greatness almost always begins with short films. Before Wes Anderson became known for his symmetrical style he made the 1994 short Bottle Rocket, Lynne Ramsay’s 1996 short Small Deaths was made before she was acclaimed for her powerfully melancholic features, and Christopher Nolan’s mammoth career was predated by his 1997 short film Doodlebug.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Ryan Swen
Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire begins with a vision of what could be called stasis in motion. Following a car on a highway as it winds its way deeper into the woods, the opening shot holds for an unnervingly long time, accompanied by droning ambient music, before moving into the car, where the legs and hands of two people sitting side by side can be glimpsed.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stuart Isaac Burnside |Faye D. Effard |Ryan Swen |David Parkinson
Has there ever been a genre shift as seismic as the move from Ridley Scott’s Alien to James Cameron’s Aliens? The leap from a claustrophobic ‘haunted house in space’ sci-fi horror to a 1980s gung-ho action film is whiplash-inducing. It may be no surprise that it is the latter that has long inspired video game developers.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Faye D. Effard |Ryan Swen |David Parkinson |Lillian Crawford
When Barbara Creed published The Monstrous-Feminine in 1993, she opened the door to a completely different way of thinking about female monsters in horror history. Instead of seeing them purely as frightening versions of women, Creed talked about how “all human societies have a conception… of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject”, and how these characters represent deeper cultural fears about women, especially concerning their bodies and sexuality.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
inreviewonline.com | Ryan Swen |Luke Gorham
It can often be difficult to evaluate the work of a director who is branching out from their niche. With Jon Bois, he has worked himself into several such pigeonholes, due to his relatively recent rapid rise to prominence (within a more cinephilic context) and the demands of market expectations. Bois, of course, has always been a video creator interested first and foremost in sports, even discounting his longstanding tenure with SB Nation and Secret Base.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Ryan Swen |David Parkinson |Lillian Crawford |Bertolt Brecht
With the exception of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang is likely the most famous active filmmaker within the loose style known as slow cinema. Renowned for his static long takes, minimal dialogue, and the obscure and unpredictable nature of his pacing and narratives, Tsai operates at an extreme end of the general cinephilic consciousness.
