Bordercolumns
-
What More Is There to Say?
The last thing we see in “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”, the devastatingly important documentary made by filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky, is a text dedicated to Sudan, the name of the last surviving male northern white rhino.
-
The Destiny of Pictures: The Donald’s Hollywood on the Potomac
I have been the film columnist for this magazine for 15 years and for many years before that was the film critic for CBC television in Winnipeg. I admit that I had become jaded watching Hollywood producers, year after swampy year, pull from their filmy top hats the same old tired cinematic rabbit tricks, so I take special delight in being able to review a movie masterpiece.
-
The Impossibilist
In Paris in 1964 the Swiss-Italian artist Alberto Giacometti asked James Lord, his friend and an American art critic, to sit for a portrait. It would require only a single sitting lasting two or three hours and then Lord could go back to America as he had planned. A fortnight later, and after 18 unpredictable sessions
-
Notes on a Celluloid Gold Mine
The history of culture is a negotiation between what we already know and what we still have to find out. Every once in a while a discovery is made that adds something new to that elusive process.
-
Painting by Numbers
“Loving Vincent” is set a year after the death of Vincent van Gogh in 1890 and uses as cast members and locations the people and places the artist painted during his lifetime.
-
The One Who Signs
The Devil’s Backbone, the second of three early films by the Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, which have been released as a Criterion boxed set, opens in an isolated orphanage in the final months of the Spanish Civil War.
-
Vertigo Redux
In Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, and arguably the greatest film ever made, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, played by James Stewart, visits his old friend, the shipbuilding magnate and wife-murderer-in-waiting, Gavin Elster, and they talk about San Franciso, the city in which they both live.
-
Being and Somethingness
Wanda, the brilliant feature-length film written and directed by Barbara Loden in 1970, in which she plays the eponymous character, has been on a welcome road to rediscovery.
-
The Portable Robert Frank
Truth is Frank’s nemesis; he admits to a fear of telling it at the same time that he recognizes, “somewhere the fearful truth seems to endure.” —Robert Enright
-
A Man For All Seasons
John Berger is protean, although the seas in which he has been involved are the watchable and readable and not the watery kind. He has been, at various times throughout a richly productive 60-year-long career, a filmmaker, screenwriter, art critic, essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, actor and drawer. The Seasons in Quincy is a 90-minute-long documentary that sets out to reveal the essence of his complicated being through four simple portraits, each one corresponding to a season.
-
Museoddity
Robert Enright reviews Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia: An Elegy for Europe
-
Frank as Ever
Don’t Blink, Laura Israel’s feature documentary about photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, makes it easy to forget how unusually close she has taken you to the world’s most influential living photographer, an artist who changed the history of his medium.
Haven’t found what you're looking for? Explore our index for material not available online.