Scraps on Cinema

I suppose two documentaries on the same subject coming out within a year of each other isn't that unusual. Anyone remember those two Whitney Houston docs from a couple years ago? Or Netflix and Hulu competing for best dibs on the Fyre Festival debacle? Well, by some sort of serendipity, here are two documentaries commemorating the life, exploration, and research of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Both born in the Alsatian region of France, Katia and Maurice first met each other at the University of Strasbourg in the late-'60s. The former a geochemist and physicist, the latter a geologist, they fell in love all but instantly, bonded by their mutual, lonely fascination with volcanoes. At a period of pivotal discovery in the field of modern geology - when confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics was yielding revelatory understanding of the violent, often cataclysmic forces perpetually shaping our planet - the duo became controversial but pioneering celebrities of the...

The word "chiara" in Italian literally means "clear." As an adjective, it can be understood as connoting clarity, or the quality of shining the light of truth onto something. Therefore, the title of Italian-American filmmaker Jonas Carpignano's latest feature, A Chiara , can be understood as not only directly referring to its protagonist, a bourgeois Calabrian teenager named Chiara played by newcomer Swamy Rotolo, but also as describing the process of Rotolo's character coming "to light" or "to clarity" over the course of the story. In the context of Carpignano's body of work, though, this layering of meanings goes a step beyond that. Carrying on the neorealist tradition of post-war Italian cinema, the now 38-year-old writer-director has, for the last decade or so, chosen to explore the evolving socio-economic and racial realities of his father's homeland, in particular the municipality of Gioia Tauro in Calabria. The population o...

Having premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival as part of its Directors' Fortnight, a colorful new sci-fi Hip Hop musical called Neptune Frost  started branching out from its limited release this week, distribution courtesy of Kino Lorber. Co-written and directed by the Rwandan artist and filmmaker Anisia Ozeyman and the American poet-musician Saul Williams, the film is set in Ozeyman's home country, though whether this is the Rwanda of the future or the Rwanda of an alternate present isn't quite clear. The narrative is structured around two parallel stories that converge upon each other. In the first, a young queer Rwandan man named Neptune (Elvis Ngabo) is forced to flee his village after he fights off (and potentially kills) a local priest attempting to molest him. Coming to the city, he is mortally wounded in a freak collision with a motor scooter, only to be reincarnated through some kind of techno-shamanism as a feminine-presenting intersex cyborg, the role ...

Writer-director David Cronenberg might insist that his latest feature is not a remake, but it's clear that the germ of the present Crimes of the Future , which goes into wide release this weekend, took root way back before the now 79-year-old filmmaker even really began to make his first infamous impressions on the North American film scene. The "original" Crimes of the Future , completed in 1970, was an avant-garde science-fiction movie. In the mold of its black-and-white predecessor Stereo , this color film was produced by its self-taught Canadian creator without the benefit of synchronized sound, the loose plot-line cryptically narrated by star  Ronald Mlodzik in the role of Dr. Adrian Tripod, an increasingly dissociated dermatologist adrift in an apocalyptic world where a cosmetics-induced plague has wiped out sexually mature females, and is seemingly accelerating both the biological and psychological degeneration (or, some might say, "evolution") of what re...

I've seen the original Top Gun  at least three times in my life, and each time I see it, I forget virtually everything about it within a matter of hours. Now, there are plenty of movies where I don't necessarily have vivid memories of them because I saw them under non-ideal circumstances, such as when, God help me, I was just too sleepy. There are other movies where I don't remember much about them because I haven't seen them in a really long time. And then there are, of course, movies that I don't remember very well because they just weren't very good, and there was nothing to remember them by. Top Gun , though, belongs to another category altogether. Often cited as a quintessential example of '80s popular culture, bound together in the ideological retrenchment and chauvinism of the Reagan era, at most a dumb and slickly produced action programmer that more than any contemporary film distilled the crass commerciality and synergistic music video vibe of a wh...

Well, a new week begins, and the sun sets too soon on a sterling cinematic opportunity. This past Sunday marked the conclusion of the weeklong engagement of A New Old Play  at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and with that there seems to be little else to do but wait to find out if U.S. distributor Icarus Films decides to handle an official home video/streaming release, or if subsequent showings this summer at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in D.C. (June 5th), the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria (June 11th), the Austin Asian Film Festival (June 24th), or the Laemmle's Glendale in California (June 24th - 30th) will be all she wrote on the general public's opportunity to see one of the most endearing and technically fascinating films of the year. What's more, no sooner has this first fiction epic by Chinese contemporary artist and documentarian Qiu Jiongjiong been spirited away, so too has the pay-what-you-can streaming service Eventive ...

Somewhere in the remote English countryside, a young middle-class professional from London named Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) rents a very picturesque old property, seeking a soul-cleansing respite from a recent trauma. Received by the owner of the estate, a red-nosed and awkward character named Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), she is forced to inform him that she is no longer "Mrs." Marlowe, stirring up horrifying memories of her last row with her emotionally unstable ex-husband James (played in flashback by Paapa Essiedu). After some time of contending with James's inability to manage his mental illness, Harper had finally had enough and announced her decision to divorce him. In response, James threatened to kill himself, and even punched Harper, leading her to furiously kick him out of their apartment. In a desperate attempt to get back in, James forced his way into the home of an upstairs neighbor, tried climbing down from the balcony, and then fell to his death, leaving H...