A lone shadow, trumpet in hand, looms over passing images of Louis Malle’s 1958 debut film Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud). On the screen, a woman wanders in despair through the dimly lit streets of Paris. A series of deep, chilling notes accompany her every step, backed by the faint beating of brushes on a […]
Corsage. Not the flowers and ribbon you wore on your wrist to your end of school dance, but a type of corset worn in the nineteenth century that is especially tight. Kaiserin Elisabeth of Austria was bound into hers, the cords pulled as tight as the maid’s strength could muster, until another maid is called […]
Leap Year (2010) is categorically a bad film. I do not deny this. That said, I have a lot of thoughts about it that confuse me. I came grovelling back to this movie last weekend as it was, in fact, a leap year, so it felt fitting to re-watch a movie that even as a ten-year-old […]
It is an inescapable fact, which movie buffs must accept, that one of the all-time landmarks of horror movies and cinema in general was in fact a borderline rip-off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The people behind F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror wanted to draw as much inspiration from Stoker’s masterpiece as possible without […]
Lovingly crafted with an assembly of puppeteers and a live score, Lula del Ray seeks to bring out the child in all of us. Through the eyes of their titular protagonist, Chicago-based arts collective Manual Cinema explores our childhood dreams (from reaching the Moon to becoming a rockstar) and the naïve mistakes, shocks and broken […]