My best IMAX Experience

by Cláudio Alves

As a last hurrah, Oppenheimer has been back on IMAX screens since last week, allowing interested audiences to revisit it in the format before the film comes to streaming on November 21st. Enjoy your last chance to see Cillian Murphy's bronzed pores projected sky high, closeups galore for titanic portraiture, faces the size of monuments. Indeed, this year, because of Nolan's blockbuster biopic, it seems like big screen superiority has been more discussed than usual, with cyclical discourse about the latest pictures to shine bright on IMAX. So much so that it got me thinking about my best experiences with the giant screens…

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Magic Mike's Last Link

• Stabroek News "Not a King but a Queenmaker" interesting take on King Richard
• Thrillist Esther Zuckerman talks to Paul Thomas Anderson about shooting a key scene in Licorice Pizza inside her childhood home
• Deadline Penelope Cruz teaming with Pedro's production company for a four-part documentary series on the global problem of child marriages
• Vulture on that impossible tracking shot in The French Dispatch
• InStyle Rita Moreno looks back on her career before hitting the big 9-0

More after the jump including Zendaya, Sondheim and New York City, C'mon C'mon, and the return of Magic Mike... 

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The beauty of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Before saying goodbye to our celebration of 2005, we must finish our look back at that year's Best Cinematography nominees. First up, we talked about the chromatic madness of Dion Beebe. Then, there were Rodrigo Prieto's cinematic elegance, the steely coldness of Wally Pfister's movies, and Robert Elswit's wide-angled wonders. Finally, we arrive at Emmanuel Lubezki, one of the past decades' most influential directors of photography. His free-flying camera movements, the masterful of natural lighting, and control of color are beyond description, so great is their beauty. No wonder AMPAS has fallen in love with the cinema of Emmanuel Lubezki, giving him eight nominations overall and three consecutive wins…

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A long take is a held breath.

by Cláudio Alves

Long takes are a constant subject of fascination for filmmakers and film lovers alike. The technical challenge inherent to them makes many directors salivate at the prospect of showing off their craft. At least, that's what, as an audience member, it sometimes feels like. Though, to characterize the long take as a mere tool of formalistic showmanship would be wrong. Depending on the case, this mechanism can be transformative, capable of bending the audience's perception of time, their attachment to what they're watching and sentimental engagement.

In 1917, Sam Mendes uses the long take as a key to sensorial immersion and ever-tightening tension. Each cut is a blink, a breath, a repositioning of the eye and recalibration of the senses. It's something that's a convention and brings comfort to the viewer. When you take it away, one feels as if the action never stops, like there's no time to breathe or to disengage with the narrative. A long take is a held breath and it can be a gloriously suffocating thing to experience…

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The New Classics - Y Tu Mama Tambien

Michael Cusumano here to add a title that is near and dear to my heart to the New Classics pantheon 

Scene: Epilogue
The Narrator in coming-of-age stories most often represents a grown-up version of the protagonist. Think The Sandlot or A Christmas Story, or the quintessential example, The Wonder Years, voices looking back, awash in nostalgia. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También not only is the narrator not a character, but the voice is indifferent, even coldly clinical in its omniscience, as likely to note the fate of a passing group of wild pigs as to reveal the deepest secrets of the protagonists.

We get used to the voice as a welcome companion throughout the film. Its flat, objective viewpoint is a welcome respite from the main trio’s frequent emotional upheavals. Little do we realize we are being set up for the emotional gut punch of the film’s epilogue...

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