M. Leary

Scenes From a Parish (Rutenbeck, 2008)

Over the past few years I have seen a number of documentaries and essay films inspired by different ecclesial byways in the US. It has been interesting to track this trend alongside all the recent hub-bub about a growing Christian Film Industry – as this increasing number of documentaries is either a creative response to […]

M. Leary

Doug Cummings at LAFF

Doug Cummings has a bit of commentary on the Los Angeles Film Festival line-up at Filmjourney. I always enjoy Doug’s festival coverage, and this year there will be several on his list that I am also anxious to see: The Silence Before Bach, Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, Kore-Eda’s Still Walking, and surprisingly… Wang Bing‘s […]

M. Leary

Darren Hughes and Michael Guillen at SFIFF

Hughes has begun uploading his thoughts on the San Francisco International Film festival, starting with Bluebeard and Adoration. (I don’t think I have ever heard someone say: God bless you, Catherine Breillat. I have no greater love/hate relationship with any director but her.) And Michael Guillen is on home territory again, with lots of thoughts […]

M. Leary

Twelve Movies – Ishai Barnoy (as cinematic as poetry about the cinema gets)

Just posted at Poetry Daily. Not sure what the copyright situation here is, so just a few lines: And I would reach out in the post-apocalyptic dark of the movie theater for those handles grafted in between the other animals, those ones that used to eat one another, the handles that marked my place in […]

M. Leary

JJ Abrams On (only kind of) Not Cheating the Mystery

In all these references in the essay to process, Abrams is talking about mystery for mystery’s sake, which doesn’t parallel art for art’s sake as much as it bisects it at an inopportune angle.

M. Leary

A Critic's Thoughts on Film Self-Distribution at BRAINTRUSTdv

This spate of small essays on the topic of filmmakers distributing their own films by whatever means was born in a recent flurry of Twitter exchanges about the question. What are the boundaries of self-promotion? What is the relationship between audience and distribution? How do festivals shape the production of cinema? These aren’t questions that […]

M. Leary

Putting Herzog in a Box

Film Studies For Free has been a favorite blog for a while precisely because of announcements like this. Starzmedia, one of Herzog’s key distributors, has posted eight of Herzog’s early and mid-career films on YouTube. These include the well seen Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Little Deiter Needs to Fly, Woyzeck, and My Best Fiend – but also […]

M. Leary

Hunger (McQueen, 2008)

The lavish flashbacks towards the end are aesthetic counterpoints to his vanishing flesh, part of a quiet rhythm that winds down refusing to tell us whether Sands was a fool or not. He simply moulders in these synecdoches of mortality.

M. Leary

Canary and Its Imagination of Disaster

By stripping down his camerawork to such bare elements, he also undoes a lot of the patterns and conventions we usually expect from science fiction. Whether it is intentional or not, Canary makes a lot of the same points as Sontag, who criticized her era of science fiction filmmaking as a fantasy that we use to cope with the terrors of the technological age.