By Jake Triola There’s a man and a woman, and they commit a crime, and they run off, and they’re chased, and it’s exciting, and it’s fun, and it’s a race, and it drifts, and it’s cool, and it’s miserable, and it’s dangerous, and it’s classic. Who’s heard this? Fritz Lang, Luchino Visconti, Joseph H. … Continue reading
By Jake Triola Not much more can be said about the “aching lushness” of Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest film. I won’t make comparisons to Casablanca (1942). They’re valid, but clearly not the essence of what the filmmaker is going for. But who can really know the intentions of any artist, and why does it matter once … Continue reading
The staff at Filmic Magazine is proud to present its fifth annual Top 10 list! Filmic contributors were asked to vote on their favorite movies of the year and discuss the merits. These are the results. HONORABLE MENTIONS Avengers: Infinity War (Dir. Anthony Russo, Joe Russo) A Quiet Place (Dir. John Krasinski) THE TEN 10. … Continue reading
By Jake Triola John Cassavetes is a filmmaker whose influence is undeniable, not only in the way he “made” movies (as in the ways they were constructed and the methodologies he employed) but in the way he made them. He just made them, and he kept doing so. Over and over. No distribution? No big … Continue reading
By Jake Triola As we approach both the release of the second of five—yes, five—Fantastic Beasts films, as well as the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which has dazzled the festival circuit, taking the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, it seems like the right moment to revisit Harry Potter and the Prisoner of … Continue reading
By Jake Triola If ever there were a filmmaker obsessed with the relationship between film and literature, it’s François Truffaut, who is noted as saying “three films a day, three books a week, and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.” A constant reader throughout his … Continue reading
By Jake Triola John Huston’s late-career film, Wise Blood, is a 1979 adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, which, as an intended parody of existentialism, follows a war veteran who sets out to form “The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,” as an avowed atheist sickened by the spread of evangelicalism in the southern … Continue reading
By Jake Triola Why help someone who doesn’t want it? If their life depends on it, maybe something, from somewhere, tells the apathetic, bourgeois part of our hearts that to act and, thus, make the choice to be a do-gooder, is just our duty as humans floating on a rock shrouded in mystery. Jean Renoir’s … Continue reading
By Jake Triola It’s been nearly fifty years since the release of Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), and the film’s fabulist quality still permeates the screen, feeling fresh as ever. The idea that a movie like Kes contains the subject material that it does is at once antithetical and apt, being a product of the social … Continue reading
by Jake Triola With Phantom Thread, the newest film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, the filmmaker gives his audience an abundance of cinematic pleasures: suspense, romance, tension, mystery, beauty, and laughter. It’s a continuation of Anderson’s impressive oeuvre of eclectic works which seem completely different and undeniably congruous. The movie introduces us to the House … Continue reading
Filmic 