Thursday, February 6, 2014

Highlights of Recent Online Criticism

Here are a few of the best recent examples of film criticism I've read which are available online.

First, Michael Koresky's The Long Day Closes: In His Own Good Time discusses one of my all-time favorite films ever since seeing it in 1993 at the San Francisco Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with Terence Davies. Koresky, in his piece for the Criterion Collection, captures what makes this uniquely magical and moving film so endlessly fascinating. The photo below is from the amazing Tammy sequence near the end of the film.


Adrian Martin's Dust of Time: Tabu, for Fandor, looks at the strategies by which Miguel Gomes subtly critiques the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and how the film's low budget led to its marvelous second half becoming a silent film within the film.


And Dream Lovers: Alain Guiraudie by Jonathan Romney in the current Film Comment nicely summarizes Guiraudie's career in conjunction with the recent retrospective of his films and the release of his latest, Stranger by the Lake. Below is a still from Guiraudie's casually homoerotic breakthrough film That Old Dream That Moves.