PT Anderson’s The Master: The Ambiguous American
Paul Thomas Anderson is not an easy American filmmaker to characterize but his work is perhaps best understood as an American response to European art cinema of the post-war years.
“Author Archive”
Review: Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”
People who have seen Lincoln often describe it as “history taking place before us” which should hardly be the response that great cinema elicits from its audience.
Ian McDonald’s “Algorithms”: An Exemplary Documentary
Algorithms provides evidence of an intelligence at work, and intelligence – more than sensibility – is evidently the quality that aids documentary cinema.
Amour: Banality of the ‘Best’
MK Raghavendra argues why Amour might not be the best film of the year:
Skyfall: The Last Englishman
For the first time we don’t see the others as bit players dancing around an infallible protagonist but as people in their own right, professionals confronting each other but nonetheless tragic elements within a single diminished structure.
Rian Johnson’s “Looper”: The Dread of the East
Cinema is a little different from literature in as much as, being hugely dependant on a paying public, it must tap into public fears rather than private ones.
David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis: A Vision of the ‘Hyperreal’
David Cronenberg is the greatest filmmaker in the English-speaking world, who has been continuing to make provocative and deeply thoughtful films when other claimants to the title like David Lynch, Atom Egoyan and Quentin Tarantino have been in decline.
Nicholas Jarecki’s “Arbitrage” – An Astute Political Allegory
What ‘America’ (in the shape of his family) is disapproving and holding in contempt for could equally well be the financial misdoings from which he has been let off. If the law let off investment bankers and hedge-fund managers who ruined so many people in 2008, America still judges them as scoundrels, is the political consolation that Arbitrage offers.
The Dark Knight Rises: Interpreting a Tragedy
Despite all the glitter and glamour of The Dark Knight Rises, it is unable to conceal the sense that it is a deeply pessimistic work. This would not have been possible if the film did not point to some actual social malaise. My own sense is that it refers obliquely to a new development of the past few years which may have sounded the death knell for traditional American capitalism. This development, I propose, is the rise of the financial derivative – described by Warren Buffet as a weapon of mass financial destruction – to a position of such importance that the nature of wealth has been transformed.
Revaluating Anurag Kashyap’s films through Gangs of Wasseypur
Anurag Kashyap’s chief strength is his sharp eye for the milieu but his films also seem curiously blank – as if there was little else underneath surface. Since his style is so visceral, one wishes they were informed by some understanding of behavior and politics but, reflect as deeply as one might, one finds neither his characters – as in Dev D – nor his political sense – as in Gulaal – perspicacious.
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