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There is gore on everything; opera is synonymous with bloodshed and erotic violence. – Peter Conrad In the beginning was the Word – and the Word was the Director. The cinema of Michael Powell is a world sha...

The Archers thought in colour from The Thief of Bagdad onwards. When British producer Alexander Korda set out to remake Raoul Walsh’s silent epic The Thief of Bagdad (1924), his intention was not fidelity to t...

Winner of Best Film and Best Director at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards, Ming yue ji shi you (Our Time Will Come, 2017) is the 29th film directed by Ann Hui, a leading figure in the Hong Kong New Wave cinema of...

Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, many people endeavoured to escape the country, with the main method available being by boat. It is estimated that on top of the 800,000 people that safely arrived i...

It’s strange to witness a film so visually bewitching and yet so narratively disorganised. Fūng gip (The Secret, Ann Hui, 1979) is such a film: completely beautiful, dark, and unsettling, yet at times incoheren...

Shot in late 1972 and released at the Melbourne Filmmakers Co-op in mid-September 1974, Dave Jones’ Yackety Yack is one of the key films made in that transitional period between the relative “void” of homegrown...

It is July and Richmond are teetering on a spot in the top eight in the Australian Football League (AFL), a sport that is akin to a religion in Melbourne. It’s an average high of 13 degrees and the chilly south...

Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), often classified as a film noir, and one of the first Hollywood films dealing with antisemitism, didn’t start out with that theme in mind. Instead, the film was based on Richar...

Hollywood never knew what to do with Gloria Grahame. When Grahame’s movie career stalled in the early 1960s, she had only been in the business for fifteen years. In that short time, she had appeared in a string...

When Gloria Grahame won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her sub-ten-minute performance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), presenter Edmund Gwenn made a playful quip about...

Kaos unites the Taviani brothers with Nobel Prize-winning author Luigi Pirandello for an explosion of onscreen Siciliana. As they had done for Sardinia in Padre Padrone (1977) and Tuscany in La Notte di San Lor...

“His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man.”” -   Anthony, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. For Vittorio and Paolo T...

From its opening moments, Padre Padrone (1977) defies expectations. On the surface, this film by brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, which is based on an autobiography by Gavino Ledda, begins with Gavino as a ...

The landscape is never simply a landscape for the Taviani Brothers. Whether fertile or barren, and in Sardinia or Sunset Boulevard, the landscape is more than a picturesque accretion of fields, trees, valleys, ...

The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them. ― ...

Is Anna (Pierre Koralnik, 1967) desperately modish or a critique of desperate modishness? Like most social satires, it prefers to have its cake and eat it. Anna depicts a world that is superficial, conformist, ...

Une Femme est Une Femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) seems like an oddity in the film canon of Jean-Luc Godard. The second feature Godard released after À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), it has the cinelitera...

22 years ago, a group of visionary Argentine filmmakers came together under the banner of El Pampero Cine, breathing new life into the world of independent Argentine cinema. Since then, these cinematic maverick...

Leonor Teles’s mirror-surfaced, headily constructed Baan opens at a moment of contemplation. Against the backdrop of a lilac-infused blue cityscape of the King Power MahaNakhon, the legendary Bangkok skyscraper...

Welcome to Issue 108 of Senses of Cinema, where we begin the year by looking backwards. Our World Poll brings together film-goers from all corners of the globe to reflect on what cinema stood out in 2023. Amid ...

“I know that Creation is a Great Wheel that cannot move without crushing someone!” La Roue (1923) “If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too... no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on be...

Cherike-ye Tārā (Ballads of Tara, 1979), the fourth feature film by Bahram Beyzaie,[1. For more information about Bahram Bayzaei's career, refer to: Siadat, Amir Hossein, “A Face in the Crowd: Ritual, Mythologi...

Despite Argentina's present socio-political and economic situation being shrouded in uncertainty and instability, its film industry is robust, consistently producing remarkable works. Contemporary Argentine cin...

This dossier represents emerging writers from RMIT University’s undergraduate Film Genre course, as they explore ways that an individual film may use, knowingly play with or revise genre tropes, in the midst of...

Translated from Portuguese by Matt Losada. This text originally appeared in Revista Piauí, no. 180, September 2021. Translated and reprinted here with kind permission of the author. In a few years it will...

I first talked with Wei Shujun back in 2020 when his debut film, Yema fenzhong (Striding into the Wind), had its US theatrical release. However, we met in person only three years later in Cannes after the premi...

After the zero-Covid policy lockdown pushed the previous edition of Pingyao International Film Festival to January 2023, Jia Zhangke and the festival team faced the challenge of organising two festivals in one ...

When Last Summer (2023) premiered at the Cannes Main Competition earlier this year, everyone expected a scandalous film. A massive age gap, incestuous themes, and, boy, does the internet love such discourse! Bu...

鉄男 (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989) is excruciatingly metal in every sense of the word. An intensely horrifying and fast-paced Japanese experimental horror, it tells of various characters being su...

In 1941, during World War II, two sisters in Great Britain, Thomasina “Thom” Hanbury (Emma Appleton) and Martha “Mars” Hanbury (Stefanie Martini), invent a machine that allows the user to tune in to radio and t...

Does protest work? Can cinema make a difference?  These were the two questions implicitly posed by "Film and Protest: Popular Uprisings in the Cold War," the retrospective of the 66th DOK Leipzig — more fo...

Richard Lowenstein’s 2001 film He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, a loose adaptation of John Birmingham’s 1994 memoir of the same title, follows Danny (Noah Taylor) with his typewriter and guitar in pursuit of...

Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought.  - Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer The cinema of Martín Rejtman is a cinema...

Often recognised for his catalogue of self-referential, comic-book-inspired films, director Kevin Smith is seldom acknowledged for his influence upon the body horror subgenre. Instead, this honour is oft attrib...

Although he has written and directed only two features, Martín Shanly has developed a distinctive voice in Argentine cinema. His style is low-key, and his character studies showcase troubled heroes. His two fil...