D.W. Mault

★★★★★ Cinema is a form that forgets its relative youth at times, for that explanation is what can only be reasoned why Francesco Rosi is not remembered in the way he should be outside of his native Italy. Hopefully, this beautiful reissue of Salvatore Giuliano (1962) by Arrow Films (with a home entertainment release soon…

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★★★★☆ There’s a certain suspicion about hieroglyphic documentary portraits of individuals of a generational span (the enjoyable Supermensch springs to mind), but The Last Impresario (2013) constantly surprises both by what it is and what it’s not. Gracie Otto (sister of Miranda) helms this portrait of legendary theatre and film producer Michael White. In spite…

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★★★☆☆ Water both resists and exists. It’s both the giver of life and the destroyer of futures. The Earth is covered by 71% of water, and it’s this enigmatic fact that renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky looks at in his latest documentary, Watermark (2013). The film alights though differing vignettes from spans continents and dives into…

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★★★☆☆ Fritz Lang is a behemoth entity who encompasses cinema from the Weimar age to playing a director called ‘Fritz Lang’ in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963). Within this startling career are elements of his disdain for the influence of the powerful and how guilt destroys and enables. Frau im Mond (1929) is the latest…

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★★★★☆ The pursuit of truth is a demand that cannot be fulfilled through seeing alone. An encounter with cinema resides through a locale of turbulent openings that allow a mental space for future thought still to be developed. Our very idea of narrative enjoyment is a misnomer, a cul­-de-­sac that needn’t answer anything other than…

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★★★★☆ Place is an inherent part of cinema, it’s the sand beneath the feet of form and breathes around content whilst acting within the consciousness of the viewer not unlike the unseen but very much felt constant of existential dread. Two of the artists most associated with place (in this case Bengal) were the dual…

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★★★★☆ In his short story The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster proclaimed that humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself and that ‘progress’ had come to mean the progress of the machine. With his broad adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s The Futurological Congress, Israeli director Ari Folman seeks to add weight to the numerous dystopian…

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★★★★☆ Desire in and of itself is artificial. According to cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, it is this that makes cinema “the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.” To Catch a Thief (1955) is an iconic exposition of desire. Whether that be desire for the accoutrement…

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★★★★☆ The pursuit of freedom is a learned rite of passage handed down to youthful exuberance. These freedoms often take the shape of kinetic apparatus given to children, whether they be skateboards or bicycles. In The Armstrong Lie (2013), Lance Armstrong talks about a bike being a child’s first grasp on the idea of independence.…

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★★★★★ Structures within the time frame of empirical perspectives have a tendency to unknowingly look in the wrong direction. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) overcomes this problem by focusing on an intensely felt portrayal of the characterisation within a closed community that allows us to see the universality of a doom-inflected generation that blindly…

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