The Cold Formalism and Corrupted Purity

Haneke’s The White Ribbon announces its intentions not with a bang, but with a glacial, unnerving quiet. Subtitled "A German Children’s Story," the film opens on the eve of World War I in the fictional Protestant village.

Karim Liu|March 5, 2026

Monsieur Oscar steps from a white limousine, mid-transformation, as Paris blurs into light around him.

Essay

Holy Motors: The Beauty of Gesture, the Mechanics of Suffering

Carax’s Holy Motors watches roles, machines, and bodies on the verge of extinction, asking what remains of the human when every identity becomes an assignment in someone else’s algorithm.

March 1, 2026

Sun-scorched ruin above the Mediterranean; leather, steel, gold, and blood framed in fetishistic close-ups—*Let the Corpses Tan* (2017).

Review

The Abstract Brutality and Sun-Scored Fetish of 'Let the Corpses Tan'

In Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s brutalist Western, character and plot are incinerated by the Mediterranean sun, leaving behind a pure, fetishistic spectacle of surfaces.

February 5, 2026

Giuliana (Monica Vitti) framed against Ravenna’s factories—yellow smoke and grey-painted landscape, colour as pathology in *Red Desert* (1964).

Essay

The Chromatics of Sickness: Colour and Consciousness in Red Desert

Antonioni’s first colour film uses a radical, painterly aesthetic to map the internal landscape of a soul fractured by the brutal beauty of the modern industrial world.

November 4, 2025

A mother and daughter facing each other at a piano; Bergman’s close-up catches the moment they almost hear one another.

Essay

Prelude to Silence: Autumn Sonata and the Impossibility of Being Heard

Bergman’s Autumn Sonata dissects the tragedy of almost-understanding: speech and listening become weapons as a mother and daughter circle an impossible encounter.

November 4, 2025

Actress records her final lines in a Leningrad dubbing studio as the crew listens—evoking the body–voice split in Averbakh’s The Voice (1982).

Essay

The Eternal Echo and annihilation in Averbakh’s The Voice

Ilya Averbakh’s quietly devastating final film is a meditation on the space between the dying body and the immortal voice, where art becomes a final, painful act of transcendence.

November 4, 2025

Christian (Claes Bang) before the illuminated “Square” installation in Stockholm—trust framed as art, and a satire of the gap between concept and conduct (*The Square*, 2017).

Review

The Sanctity of the Void: The Uncomfortable Art of Watching Us Fail in The Square

Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner is a savagely intelligent satire of the art world’s moral vacuum, but its relentless catalogue of human failure sometimes mistakes spectacle.

November 4, 2025