Movie review • Under Your Skin ( Käpy selän alla ) by Mikko Niskanen: The hottest of its time.
A film which aroused aggravation, opposition, but also fervent admiration. Under your skin is considered by the Finnish critic Peter von Bagh as one of those pivotal films which marked in Finland, during the Sixties, the passage "from the old [to] the new cinema. " A…
FilmTalk • Italian neo-realism and its legacy
Although, by the late-1970s, Vittorio De Sica’s reputation had been overshadowed by his neo-realist peer Roberto Rossellini, De Sica’s influence can still be felt whenever a director takes to the streets and employs non-professional actors from where the film is actually being s…
Movie review • We All Loved Each Other So Much by Ettore Scola
History, with a capital H, was a melting pot for modern Italian comedy that, at the dawn of the sixties, gradually detached itself from the slapstick and comedy of manners. Works like The Great War (Mario Monicelli 1959), Everybody Go Home (Luigi Comencini, 1960), or A Diffi…
Movie review • Funeral parade of roses by Toshio Matsumoto
"I am the wound, the knives that strike, The blows that crush, the head that reels, I am wrenched limbs and grinding wheels, Victim and hangman, as you like!...", quote from the poem Héautontimorouménos by Charles Baudelaire (Greek title meaning "The Self Tormente…
FilmTalk • Jazz in Films
With fairgrounds and variety shows as its early venues, cinema was commonly seen as a lowbrow art form, and it’s unsurprising that it became associated with popular music – or, indeed, music “from the wrong side of the tracks”. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), for instance, is a …
FilmTalk • German Expressionism
Dr. Mabuse, in the famous film by Fritz Lang: "Expressionism is just a game. But why not. Now everything has become a game.” So, in the early 1920s, Expressionism apparently became a commonplace phenomenon. The term Expressionism is used in different senses. In 1911, the cr…
Movie review • 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick
On the threshold of the space conquest, Kubrick laid the touchstone of the science fiction movie. A metaphysical and grandiose work with a captivating rhythm. The dawn of humanity. Apes, or the first men of ape-like appearance, having difficulty in feeding, fight over water. Und…
Movie review • Eraserhead by David Lynch : In Heaven, everything is fine
Sick movie. Difficult to produce a critique built on a universe that eludes interpretation so much. The only thing that can be verbalized is the impact of the film . It's common to talk about cinematic UFOs for every David Lynch movie. Yet the disastrous Dune aside, only one…
Movie review • Intimate Lighting : Fruit of the Czech New Wave by Ivan Passer
The colorful characters finally play in unison only in absurdity, sweeping the cacophony of regrets and fears. If we only had to name a filmmaker who did not receive the recognition he/she could have claimed, it would be for us that of Ivan Passer . A regular screenwriter of Mil…
