-
Continue reading →: Steve McQueen’s BlitzThe newest Oscar bait wannabe, Steve McQueen’s Blitz is a social panorama about lives lived outside the battlefields – weapon factory workers, scavengers, underground socialist movement – following a biracial kid, George (Elliot Heffernan), on a tenuous journey to reunite with his mom (Saoirse Ronan). The movie has a good…
-
Continue reading →: The Castaways of Turtle IslandA blasphemy against exotica. The Castaways of Turtle Island is most farcical I’ve seen from Rozier and also his funniest. Literally got stomach cramps from laughing during one scene. In the beginning, the film intercuts between a jellyfish shaped lamp projecting shadows onto a portrait of a nude black woman…
-
Continue reading →: Still Life: Leaving Something BehindThree thousand years of history desecrated in 2 years in the name of progress. A city gradually turns itself into ruins and eventually disappears underwater. Jia Zhangke’s 2006 Venice Golden Lion Winning Still Life is a primal representation of what Andre Bazin described as the Mummy Complex – a story…
-
Continue reading →: A Different Man – A Dark, Mind-bending Identify CrisisCan someone truly become a different person? This is the central question Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man poses throughout its runtime. Often times hysterical and often times chilling, the movie tracks the quasi-fantastical journey of Edward, a man with neurofibromatosis, played by an initially unrecognizable Sebastian Stan, who accepts an…
-
Continue reading →: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: An Estranged Late FilmThe old guns are coming all out these couple of years. Out of all the cinematic grandmasters who can still conjure themselves to make new films, just this year, we saw the release or festival premieres of Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, Godard’s Scénarios, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, and Paul…
-
Continue reading →: Here: The Fleeing MomentsIt is now or never that we should discuss Bas Devos’s scintillating fourth feature Here, since, in a couple of months, the internet conversation and discourse surrounding a movie with this particular title will be solely dedicated to a certain Robert Zemeckis joint. Joke aside, this delicately minor work that debuted…
-
Continue reading →: Retro-review: CasablancaThis last Wednesday, the Princess Cinema at downtown Waterloo screened Casablanca for its 39th birthday. This is an annual tradition for the landmark arthouse cinema, as it showed this film on 16mm on the day of its inauguration in 1985. What is most noteworthy, the ticket price is purposefully kept…
-
Continue reading →: TIFF ’24 Review: Universal LanguageIn Universal Language, Matthew Rankin introduces an offbeat, alternative version of his hometown, Winnipeg, where Iranians are the main inhabitants, and Farsi and French are the official languages. It’s very delightful to see a film that weaves the formal idiosyncrasies of Kiarostami, Tati, and Wes Anderson into something that feels…
-
Continue reading →: Collective Monologue: The Compassionate and Observant Capsule of Argentine ZoosFor every 10 movies at TIFF about Naomi Watts befriending penguins, there’s a movie like this that warms my soul. Jessica Rinland’s experimental documentary Collective Monologue is interested in interspecies connection and the layouts of infrastructural compounds formed around humans and animals. Its title refers to a theory by Jean…
-
Continue reading →: TIFF ’24 Review: Bound in HeavenThe moment fireworks fully reach the sky and explode is the moment they begin to fade. The two lovebirds in Bound in Heaven, Xia You and Xu Zitai, choose to embrace their lives as if every second is that brightest moment and forego the rest. In a film that hopelessly…
Welcome to Cinema Travelogue
If we consider the overview of the world of cinema as a map, then the voyage to connect the scattered dots in between is what we’re invested in. Serge Daney once described voyage as ‘without luggage, totally self-sufficient in his dispossession’. Being a citizen of world cinema is to abandon the luggage of predefined cultural expectations and meet each film and each filmmaker on their own cinematographic terms. If you are down for this journey, please consider subscribing to this travelogue.
Tag on for the ride!
Stay updated with our latest weekly reviews of classics and new releases
Cinema Travelogue 