Our in-depth look at M. Night Shyamalan’s early films continues with Unbreakable: perhaps the only mainstream Hollywood formalist film, a mass-market movie approached with an unrelenting European art film sensibility.
Our taste for McQueen’s earnest – and now Oscar-winning – exposé says a lot about our own liberal complacency. In this respect we’d do well to develop a finer appreciation for the not so discrete charms of an earlier classic.
TIFF 2014: How can master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman scrutinise the body of the University and fail to notice it dying before his eyes?
TIFF 2014: Ida’s black and white imagery and heavy use of static shots might seem a little one-dimensional, but its simplicity is part of its charm.
TIFF 2014: This is a film inspired by the irrepressible spirit of youth, a spirit unbowed by the horrific gas attacks suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
TIFF 2014: The national divide between two very different parts of one city, El Paso and Ciudad Juaréz, is the setting for this provocative documentary about the catastrophic ‘war on drugs’.
We conclude our in-depth analysis of M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece with a close look at motifs and structural aspects, concluding with a shot-by-shot commentary on the post-funeral sequence.
A visual analysis of key scenes of M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece and his virtuoso use of motifs, staging and interconnectedness to achieve coherence and closure.
A stunning piece of high-precision filmmaking, formally inventive, thematically intelligent, emotionally gripping, a momentous commercial success, an almost perfect film.
A return to this severely under-appreciated film, for its discussion of storytelling, interpretation, film criticism, artificiality, stylisation, interconnectedness – and whether stories can become real.
It was one of the most hated films of the 2000s, but with the trauma now at a distance, it is time to appreciate M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water for its very real qualities.
Ruminations on sex, narcissism, mirrors, thematic reflections, melodrama and patterns in Black Swan.