Cinema Year Zero

Joseph Owen recounts his experiences at a Five Flavours Film Festival in Warsaw, in which a new city provides room for thought about how man-made infrastructures impinge on the individual.

“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”

Dan Wilkinson takes affront at the new mode of prudishness ushered in by the internet age, presenting the unfiltered sexuality of experimental films Pickelporno and Sweet Love Remembered as possible antidotes.

The uneasy status of Film Criticism is readily discussed.

Blaise Radley profiles pop-culture’s greatest representation of the film critic: Jay Sherman, the animated hack and one-time Simpsons guest star.

Joseph Owen returns to the Locarno Film Festival, where he casts a sideways the economics of the professional film critic between bottles of Swiss red.

Fedor Tot delves into the world of the film festival critics workshop, asking if its purpose serves less to help individual participants than to uphold institutional compliance.

Orla Smith explores her personal history with the film catalog-turned-social media app Letterboxd as a way of marking changing taste and sharpening perspective.

Natasha Fedorson takes Roland Barthes ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ as a conduit for her own ruminations on the spaces where we can engage with the medium.

Esmé Holden gives a close reading of the ultimate critic-turned-filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard’s key 1966 film Made in U.S.A.