Screen Rats

“T en years ago I heard Lubomyr Melnyk perform for the first time. Playing 40 notes a second, the 74-year-old pianist conjures transcendental landscapes and imagistic …

L éonor Serraille loves headstrong, emotional women. The French director burst onto the Cannes scene when, in 2017, she won the Camera d’Or (the prize for the best fir…

“See the child,” Cormac McCarthy instructs us in the first line of his novel ‘Blood Meridian’. Similarly, in the opening scene of 2013’s The Counselor, McCarthy – thro…

A few years back, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal depicted the difficult adjustment of a drummer to life without hearing, leaving behind an artistic field so dependen…

S o many films that are considered essential queer cinema do not have happy endings. Brokeback Mountain, the love story between two cowboys in Wyoming based on a novel…

A film about not being able to keep a good Nazi down feels very apposite in the current climate of rabid conservatism, and so that might go some way to justify the ex…

S oaked in sweat and bathed in orange light, Claire Denis’s second English language feature, Stars at Noon, is a film that seems to exist in a state of permanent dusk.…

I n 1998 Wes Anderson cast Jason Schwartzman as precocious high schooler Max Fischer in his breakout comedy Rushmore. Twenty-five years later, after remaining firm fri…

T he mid-budget studio comedy fall from grace has been tragic, to say the least. A beloved genre that used to commandeer both box office and home entertainment for dec…

I magine your first credit as a costume designer for cinema was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. And now imagine that you include Francis Ford Coppola and Wes And…

A seventysomething man stands at his bookshop’s storefront, telling customers they cannot come in. Without the possibility of browsing, many of them sadly walk away. …

H ello Sophie Monks Kaufman, this is Wes.” In his slow, warm, contemplative drawl, my name sounds better than ever before. I am in seat 17C of easyjet flight K54K39S w…

In a new monthly column, Anton Bitel highlights a selection of must-haves, from re-releases to streaming premieres.  The Lighthouse, dir. Robert Eggers, 2018 “I’m…

M idway through Greatest Days, based on the 2017 Take That jukebox musical The Band, a ‘Shine’ musical sequence takes place on an airport runway. The song was the band…

T he history of animation is checkered and complex, but the first name to come up is usually Walt Disney Studios – Mickey Mouse’s creator is more often than not herald…