Senses of Cinema

Winner of Best Film and Best Director at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards, Ming yue ji shi you (Our Time Will Come, 2017) is the 29th film directed by Ann Hui, a leading figure in the Hong Kong New...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/our-time-will-come/

Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, many people endeavoured to escape the country, with the main method available being by boat. It is estimated that on top of the 800,000 people that s...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/boat-people/

It’s strange to witness a film so visually bewitching and yet so narratively disorganised. Fūng gip (The Secret, Ann Hui, 1979) is such a film: completely beautiful, dark, and unsettling, yet ...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/the-secret/

Shot in late 1972 and released at the Melbourne Filmmakers Co-op in mid-September 1974,1 Dave Jones’ Yackety Yack is one of the key films made in that transitional period between the relative �...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/yackety-yack-dont-talk-back/

It is July and Richmond are teetering on a spot in the top eight in the Australian Football League (AFL), a sport that is akin to a religion in Melbourne. It’s an average high of 13 degrees and...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/queensland/

Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), often classified as a film noir, and one of the first Hollywood films dealing with antisemitism, didn’t start out with that theme in mind. Instead, the film wa...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/a-splash-of-light-in-the-darkness-edward-dmytryks-crossfire/

Hollywood never knew what to do with Gloria Grahame. When Grahame’s movie career stalled in the early 1960s, she had only been in the business for fifteen years. In that short time, she had app...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/i-know-a-way-sudden-fear/

When Gloria Grahame won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her sub-ten-minute performance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), presenter Edmund Gwenn made a p...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/tribute-to-a-tyrant-the-bad-and-the-beautiful/

Kaos unites the Taviani brothers with Nobel Prize-winning author Luigi Pirandello for an explosion of onscreen Siciliana. As they had done for Sardinia in Padre Padrone (1977) and Tuscany in La N...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/pirandello-on-film-kaos/

“His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man.”” –   Anthony, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.1 F...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/caesar-must-die/

From its opening moments, Padre Padrone (1977) defies expectations. On the surface, this film by brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, which is based on an autobiography by Gavino Ledda, begins wi...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/padre-padrone/

The landscape is never simply a landscape for the Taviani Brothers. Whether fertile or barren, and in Sardinia or Sunset Boulevard, the landscape is more than a picturesque accretion of fields, t...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/the-night-of-the-shooting-stars/

The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, bu...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/one-sings-the-other-doesnt/

Is Anna (Pierre Koralnik, 1967) desperately modish or a critique of desperate modishness? Like most social satires, it prefers to have its cake and eat it. Anna depicts a world that is superficia...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/anna-2/

Une Femme est Une Femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) seems like an oddity in the film canon of Jean-Luc Godard. The second feature Godard released after À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), it ha...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/cteq/une-femme-est-une-femme/

22 years ago, a group of visionary Argentine filmmakers came together under the banner of El Pampero Cine, breathing new life into the world of independent Argentine cinema. Since then, these cin...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/news/call-for-contributions-22-years-of-el-pampero-cine-trailblazing-independent-cinema-in-argentina/

Leonor Teles’s mirror-surfaced, headily constructed Baan opens at a moment of contemplation. Against the backdrop of a lilac-infused blue cityscape of the King Power MahaNakhon, the legendary B...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/interviews/a-place-to-live-in-an-interview-with-leonor-teles/

Welcome to Issue 108 of Senses of Cinema, where we begin the year by looking backwards. Our World Poll brings together film-goers from all corners of the globe to reflect on what cinema stood out...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/editorial/introduction-13/

“I know that Creation is a Great Wheel that cannot move without crushing someone!” La Roue (1923) “If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too… no matter how many movies, even very go...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/festival-reports/was-i-thinking-of-death-the-61st-new-york-film-festival/

Cherike-ye Tārā (Ballads of Tara, 1979), the fourth feature film by Bahram Beyzaie,1 encountered an unusual fate. Shortly after the commencement of filming, a tragic fire at Abadan city’s Rex...

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/feature-articles/echoes-of-illusions-mythical-reverberations-exploring-folklore-and-tazieh-in-ballad-of-tara/