ESSAYS
September 30, 2010
Central Station is one of the most popular and internationally acclaimed Brazilian films of the 1990s. It heralded a renaissance in Brazilian cinema.
October 1, 2010
What is independent cinema? Critics and film scholars have wrestled with a definition of independent for most of cinema’s existence.
February 27, 2018
I’ve been excited about Black Panther from the moment I heard about it. Anything that involves Our Lady Lupita (you know her as Lupita Nyong’o) get me psyched. I adore Lupita—and the fact that she can actually spit some bars is icing on a fine cake.
March 22, 2010
What I found most interesting in The World Of Apu is how much the representation of India came so close to my vision of Haiti, my native country.
March 22, 2010
Argentina has one of the most impressive cinematography in the world. Within that cinema, Fernando E. Solanas is a director of seminal importance. In his essay, Towards a Third cinema, Solanas and his co-writer, Octavio Getino, galvanize the overall revolutionary ideas of the time into the concept of a decolonization cinema, denouncing the weak, liberal arts that have, up until […]
March 22, 2010
Knocks at my door explores the political instability that has plagued Latin-American countries and Third-world countries in general.
July 24, 2011
The world is whole beyond human knowing. -Wendell Berry The Tree of Life, by renowned director Terrence Malick, is years in the making. Its history starts even before Malick’s previous film, The New World, was distributed in 2005. After generating a substantial amount of ink in the media, and hot on the heels of the film’s highly publicized win of […]
October 1, 2010
There are some movies that change your perception of what is possible, what is allowed. Alexander Payne's Election was that for me.
October 1, 2010
In Come Drink With Me, King Hu considers each of the director’s tools, using camera movement differently than editing or the wide-screen space.
March 22, 2010
One of the most interesting aspects of South-American cinema is its post-colonial perspective. Having lived myself and being raised in a Third-world country, I can identify and relate to the plight of South-American characters, living up to their (displaced) roots while fighting their imposed colonial heritage. I’ve seen firsthand the social stratification that the colonial rule instilled into the indigenous […]
March 26, 2010
In I Don’t Want To Talk About It which precedes her sudden death in 1995, Maria Luisa Bemberg explores the same themes as in her most famous movie, Camila.
March 22, 2010
It was a pleasant surprise to see Alice doesn’t live here anymore. Is it a feminist film? Can a male filmmaker look at a woman through a female perspective?