Chaplin’s 1940 film ‘The Great Dictator’ mocks Hitler’s absurdity and overweening vanity, while highlighting Germany’s psychological captivity to a political fraud.
Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name: an erotic romance imbued with the effervescence of a European summer.
Frenesy
MIFF 2017 made good on its promise to explore new worlds, with timely films on American civil rights, Indigenous music, and queer activism. Here’s our pick of the ones to see.
Andy Serkis as Caesar in War for the Planet of the Apes.
Chernin Entertainment, TSG Entertainment
Apes on film once wore monkey suits but today’s actors are drawing on techniques of method acting to bring complex, motion captured simian characters to life.
Lipstick Under My Burkha challenges India’s patriarchal society as well as the film industry’s bias against women.
Variety.com
Alankrita Srivastava’s feminist film has Indian censors in a tizzy.
Students and striking workers occupy the projection hall of the Cannes Film Festival Palace to prevent showing of films in 1968.
AP Photo/Raoul Fornezza
Their critiques may be more gentle, their attacks more circumspect – but they are resonant nonetheless. And when filmmakers like Farhadi confront Trump, they’re on familiar turf: They’ve seen his type back home.
Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight: one of the most beautiful films in recent years.
A24, Plan B Entertainment/idmb
There are five very good films nominated for the Best Picture gong and one extraordinary one.
Melbourne-based start up Choovie will launch a service offering demand based ticket pricing to filmgoers at the end of March.
Lucky images/shutterstock
Imagine if you could pay less to see films that are less popular. Dynamic ticket pricing already happens in China – and it’s about to start here in over 100 Australian cinemas.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family.
Channel Four Films
Woody Harrelson’s directorial debut, released this month, signals that we are in a new age of cinema.
Jayalalithaa Jayaram, who passed away in December 2016, was a film actress and populist chief minister of India’s southern Tamil Nadu state.
Babu/Reuters
Performance politics has made Donald Trump the new president of the United States. But this is far from new to south India, where the mixing of cinema and politics has a long history.
By engaging a broad base of people on a popular level, film has a much more immediate and visceral impact than formal lustration proceedings.
Before the Rain (1994)
Cinema can be instrumental in opening up dialogue on collective culpability for the past. Manchevski’s Before the Rain and Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze are perfect examples of this.
In virtual reality cinema, the audience chooses what to look at and when. What does this mean for traditional narrative storytelling?
Virtual reality cinema in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sander Koning/ANP
VR cinema explodes the frame, placing the spectator inside the space of the film. Audiences effectively edit it themselves, by choosing what to look at and when.
A scene from the TV mini-series, ‘Mars’.
National Geographic
The recently broadcast TV mini-series, “Mars”, combines fiction and nonfiction in a way that places them in balance. This kind of combination is likely to feature in more television series and films.
Melissa McCarthy in The Boss: ‘yet another bad choice on her part’.
Gary Sanchez Productions
Revelations of sexual abuse in the making of Last Tango in Paris give the film ‘the air of a snuff piece’. Film scholars must reassess the work – there is no place for revering artistic achievement over human suffering.