Issue 91 - Summer 2022

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Mark Peranson ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN Vanesa Mazza ASSISTANT EDITOR Peter Mersereau CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman PRODUCTION AND MARKETING MANAGER Kayleigh Rosien FINANCIAL MANAGER Je
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
It’s that time again. Over the last two decades in these pages I’ve spent way too much time (at great personal anguish) trying to come to grips with the experience of the Festival de Cannes even if by this point in the history of film journalism, a f
Cinema Scope20 min read
Wippet Good
David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future may be marked as a “return” for the 79-year-old director in a number of respects. His first feature in eight years, it is also his first to be based on an original script since eXistenZ. In addition, Crimes see
Cinema Scope17 min read
Endless Night
The first shot is a panoramic view of Rome on a bright summer day. It seems unusually quiet as we swerve along mostly depopulated streets looking through the windscreen of a car. The gliding movements produce a slightly otherworldly feel, enhanced by
Cinema Scope8 min read
Ordinary Beauty
Writing in 1971, Vivian Gornick described the US women’s movement as “a declaration of independence against the false description of the self.” Although articulated in a different place and time, the phrase has a distinct resonance with the documenta
Cinema Scope8 min read
Revelations by Sunlight
The experimental filmmakers known as Colectivo los ingrávidos came together in Tehuacán, Mexico in 2012, adopting their name—which translates into English as “the weightless”—from the title of the first novel of Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, a wor
Cinema Scope22 min read
Send In The Clowns
The brightest light in the Chinese independent cinema world at this moment is Beijing-based filmmaker and artist Qiu Jiongjiong. In an atmosphere of increasing surveillance and control of non-official, unauthorized artistic activity in China, Qiu, no
Cinema Scope10 min read
Cheesy Movies
Let me tell you about a few movies I saw in the summer of 2000, when I was 11 years old, that would become vitally important to my budding cinephilia. One was Godzilla 2000, the first Japanese Godzilla movie to reach Western theatres since 1985, and
Cinema Scope12 min read
The Natives Are Restless
The 75th anniversary celebration of Cannes was very much a “celebration of cinema,” a my-God-it’s-full-of-stars-studded affair intended as a show of power that, rightly, would make any other such movie-based event jealous. As witnessed by its anniver
Cinema Scope5 min read
Triangle of Sadness
The aphorism “eat the rich,” long attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has found a contemporary home in popular media. Whether TikTok teens making snappy, meme-laden upper-class critiques in under a minute (now competing for Cannes awards themselves)
Cinema Scope5 min read
Stars at Noon
After waiting 34 years to return to the Cannes Competition, Claire Denis deserved a warm welcome back. Instead, she got to be the chosen victim of the Brown Bunny Syndrome, the annually recurring compulsion among festival attendees to proclaim a film
Cinema Scope5 min read
Eo
When Jerzy Skolimowski cancelled his press commitments at Cannes to promote his new feature, EO, he denied critics and cinephiles an explanation behind the festival’s most mystifying entry. All but engineered to prompt bemusement, the film, a bold, m
Cinema Scope11 min read
Gross Anatomy
It’s been ten years since Sensory Ethnography Lab cine-anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel made a quite literal splash at the 2012 Locarno Festival with their first feature-length collaboration, Leviathan, which still stands as
Cinema Scope5 min read
Will-o’-the-Wisp
Joao Pedro Rodrigues has always made shifting between disparate registers and genres appear like the most natural thing in the world, and his self-declared musical fantasy Will-o’-the-Wisp is another case in point. If the sort of musical numbers and
Cinema Scope6 min read
Men
For all of his evident flaws as an artist, Alex Garland is one of the few filmmakers in the world who is genuinely concerned with science and its methods. One of cinema’s great paradoxes is how a medium so dependent on science and technology is also
Cinema Scope9 min readGender Studies
A Cinema of Care
When people discuss the documentary work of Janis Cole and Holly Dale, a number of adjectives will inevitably appear: “caring,” “generous,” and “empathetic” among them. The filmmakers’ commitment and intention of sharing space with their subjects res
Cinema Scope8 min read
Living in Intersected Times
“May you live in interesting times”—however reviled the glib and privileged title of the 2019 Venice Biennale group exhibition may have been, it feels fair to say that few expected the years between the subsequent edition of the highest-profile event
Cinema Scope8 min read
In Transit
Ordinarily when one is tasked to compose an obituary for a public figure, the writer can assume that the reader has some basic familiarity with the subject. This lends itself to a particular approach, which usually entails an expression of the subjec
Cinema Scope9 min read
Lessons in Oppression
Apart from those few who managed to escape from totalitarian regimes and occupied countries, most North Americans know as little about living under a dictatorship and/or in an occupied territory and what that entails as I do. For the past two decades
Cinema Scope5 min read
Hit The Road
Many years ago, I sat down for a festival screening of an Iranian film next to another local Toronto critic whose pugnacious reputation preceded him. Unsolicited and not-so-rhetorically, he asked me if the long scenes of rural driving native to so ma
Cinema Scope5 min read
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Eager to celebrate a theatrical box-office win, Variety recently praised the success of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s equally moving and galling Everything Everywhere All at Once, chirping that its broad appeal beyond arthouse crowds attests not
Cinema Scope5 min read
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
“I just did the ‘tell’ part, hoping they’d imagine the ‘show’ part.” That’s Stan, the child protagonist of Richard Linklater’s latest animated feature, Apollo 10½, speaking to his mother about a class presentation he botched. But the statement could
Cinema Scope6 min read
The Plains
In his first feature, The Plains, David Easteal nestles his camera into the backseat of a Hyundai sedan belonging to Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), a lawyer in his late fifties. As he commutes home from a sleepy office park on the outskirts of Melbourne,
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Northman
Ever since making his Sundance debut with The Witch (2015), Robert Eggers has been eyed as a potential breakout from his class of millennial name-brand auteurs. There’s a long history of horror movies making a splash at that festival—going back to an

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