OFCS members don’t just write film reviews. Here are several articles you might find interesting.
Best of Lists
5 Favorites #124: Jude Law
Best Performances of 2021
Matt Oakes @ Silver Screen Riot
Interviews
Interview with S. Louisa Wei:
- Excerpt: about her family history, shooting documentaries, Esther Eng, the documentary scene nowadays, and other topics.
Joyfully Weird and Fearless: Stephanie Hsu on Everything Everywhere All at Once
- Excerpt: It’s easy to be weird and chaotic and make things happen or make funny noises. But it’s harder to make sure that that’s coming from a real true darkness that also has a lot of heart beneath it.
Essays
An Appreciation – Rashomon
Allen Almachar @ The MacGuffin
- Excerpt: Kurosawa pushed through the boundaries of the artform to redefine storytelling itself.
Awards Coverage
95th Academy Award Predictions: Best Picture
Travis Burgess @ The Sacred Wall
- Excerpt: It’s never too early to start predicting next year’s Oscars!
The Friday Face-Off, Winners Bracket, Round 5 #1
Poll: Remaking Best Directing, 1997
Upcoming Film Previews
The Cellar
Family Squares
Firebird
Gagarine
Hatching
Hostile Territory
Marcel the Shell with Shoes
Memory
Minions: The Rise of Gru, updated
Operation Mincemeat
Paris, 13th District
Petite Maman
The Tale of King Crab
Top Gun: Maverick, updated
Where the Crawdads Sing
Festival Coverage (Individual or Group Reviews)
Aftershock
- Excerpt: Black women are disproportionately affected by maternal mortality, and at least some of that difference may be attributable to poorer quality care. That certainly seems to be the case for both Gibson and Isaac, and racism often makes it difficult for family members to advocate for loved ones.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes
- Excerpt: Chernobyl is constructed primarily from archival materials: the visual materials come from archives discovered in the former Soviet Union, much of it previously unseen, while the audio elements are a combination of archival materials from the time of the explosion and more recent interviews.
Gabor
- Excerpt: [Lafreniere’s interviews are carefully composed, and, like Wes Anderson, she loves placing her subjects in the exact center of the frame. She also shares Anderson’s taste for detailed backgrounds that make you wish you were in the room so you could look at what you’re seeing more closely.
Let the Little Light Shine
- Excerpt: Most people want their kids to go to a good school, and most kids want that for themselves. That this is not considered a basic right of every child and every family, in so rich a country as the United States, is an indictment of how little as a society we care for children in general (although we may care a lot about those within our own family).
Navalny
- Excerpt: Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny is truly a film for our times.
Shorts (Full Frame Film Festival)
- Excerpt: [“The Silent Shore” is] a beautiful and somewhat unexpected film, full of visual richness and the expertly-narrated memories of two people who lived a full life.
Shorts (Full Frame Film Festival)
- Excerpt: Everything in this film is made strange, creating a study in shapes and shadows, bathing viewers in ambient sounds (there’s no dialogue for the first nine minutes) and immersing them in surroundings both grim and mysterious.
Shorts (Full Frame Film Festival)
- Excerpt: “Video Visit” is a straightforward documentary that occasionally recalls Frederick Wiseman’s films in its willingness to let the camera run to capture footage emphasizing the context as well as the main story.
Skate Dreams
- Excerpt: If Skate Dreams sometimes feels more like a collage than a traditionally-organized documentary, that may be exactly what the filmmakers intended. This is a doc about skateboarding, after all, and those folks like to play by their own rules.
Soldat Ahmet
- Excerpt: Soldat Ahmet is a character study of Ahmet, but it’s also an art film that mixes realistic, observational scenes—Ahmet training in the gym, competing in the ring, working at the base, rehearsing in the studio, and visiting his family—with more abstract sequences that comment on how boxing, theatre, and the military are all stylized forms of performance.
The Territory
- Excerpt: …the Uru-eu-wau-wau lands are like “an island of rainforest surrounded by farms,” and the farms are constantly encroaching on the indigenous territory. It’s like that Algernon Blackwood tale in which an island becomes mysteriously smaller while the protagonist sleeps, except that there’s no mystery about the forces at work in the Amazon—capitalism coupled with racism and plain old-fashioned greed.
Other Types of Articles
Alain Resnais’ Short Films on Art, Plastic and Institutional Hypnotism
- Excerpt: The camera drifts through the maze of pipes and chimneys in a synthesis of Leni Riefenstahl monumentality and Busby Berkeley geometries.
