Filmmaker, author, teacher: www.whitecitycinema.com
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Relative 2022
People of Chicago!
RELATIVE will screen at the Music Box Theatre on Wednesday, June 8, 2022: musicboxtheatre.com/films/relative
RELATIVE will screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday, June 10, Wednesday, June 15 and Thursday, June 16, 2022: www.siskelfilmcenter.org/relative
Hope to see you there!
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The Grandmaster 2013
Reviewed for Cinefile.info:
While Wong Kar-wai has been a darling of Western critics and cinephiles for much of his career, his movies have been regarded as arty and pretentious specialty items back home in Hong Kong. The reversal of this trend with THE GRANDMASTER may be explained by its China-centric qualities, namely its deep exploration of Chinese identity and history and the philosophical side of kung-fu. Western critics lamented the film’s “patchwork” quality (it is certainly the most elliptical thing…
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Like Someone in Love 2012
The late Chilean director Raul Ruiz’s indispensable book Poetics of Cinema argues against the necessity of “central conflict theory” that has long dominated commercial narrative filmmaking in the western world. If Abbas Kiarostami, one of the world’s greatest living directors, ever wrote a comparable book on film theory, one suspects he might similarly challenge the notion of the “three-act structure.” The Japanese-set Like Someone in Love may well be the Iranian master’s most provocative work; his extremely unconventional handling of…
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A Ghost Story 2017
The scene in which Will Oldham’s character delivers a long-winded monologue about how nothing lasts forever may be the worst scene in cinema’s history. My personal idea of hell is being forced to watch that on a loop with my eyes pried open, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
