格拉斯哥电影节的经历对我来说是很多个第一次组成的：第一次在一天内参加一共五个放映和讲座；第一次参加电影行业的networking；第一次带着行李箱看电影。这些经历如此的新奇和兴奋，以至于肉体上的疲惫都被大脑自动忽略。 This year, my experience at Glasgow Film Festival was made up of many personal firsts: the first time I attended a total of five screenings and lectures in one day; the first time I attended a film industry networking event; the first time I took my suitcase to a …
The opening scene of The Batman (2022) shares a point of view with the villain spying on his victim. Paul Dano’s Riddler announces his presence behind the binocular lens aurally; his heavy breathing is accompanied by the soundtrack of Ave Maria and the background noise of Gotham City. After observing …
‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. ‘ – Albert Camus Death is a subject that human beings steer clear of in the majority of societies. In English culture, people refer to a dead person as a departed person, while in Chinese tradition the word …
Stage Door （1937）In 1936, RKO Pictures acquired the film rights to Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s play Stage Door. They, quite rightly, believed that this story of life in an all-female theatrical boarding-house would be a good vehicle to show off the talents of some of the young actresses …
Like many movie-goers, a good trailer can inspire me to part with my hard-earned money. The trailer for The Worst Person in the World (2021, dir. Joachim Trier) doesn’t quite do justice to how serious and emotive the film can get. Apr 15, 2022
“When you are observing me, who do you think I am observing?” Directed by Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) is a careful and elaborate portrait of the “female gaze” and femininity from a perspective of a female director. The film begins with a young French painter …
To analyse anything, especially as academics or critics, we invent labels and categories, we build vocabularies about our topic and around it. Often, this is useful, since it offers us tools for examination, and naming and defining something can make it easier to notice and hold up to the light. It …
由精神分析学中的偷窥理论看希区柯克电影中的偷窥文化 Hitchcock and his unique style have occupied an important place in the history of Hollywood films and even the history of the world cinema at large Apr 15, 2022
Upon her death in March 2019, Agnes Varda was lauded not only for her importance as a filmmaker but also for her feminism, cinematically investigating any situation in which she found gender injustice. Her authorial voice highlighted the unique inner lives of women, with her varied protagonists worrying about impending …
Tokyo Story (dir. Yasujirō Ozu, 1953), a phenomenal film with a simple story framed by Japanese minimalism, tells the story of Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama, a retired couple from Onomichi, south-west Japan, who decide to travel to visit their children in Tokyo. Apr 15, 2022
This issue’s theme, The Gaze, can lead to a strong binary association in our minds – the gaze, as a concept, is in large majority discussed as either male or female. Another universally available connotation with the term is its dependence on the visual. The Gaze, naturally, has to do …
1978’s Halloween is one of the most influential horror films of all time. Where once horror’s danger was avoidable – don’t go into shark-infested waters, don’t stay at a creepy motel with a man and his stuffed birds – Halloween showed viewers that horror could come for them. Mar 8, …
GIRL DIRECTOR: A How-To Guide for the First-Time, Flat-Broke Film and Video Maker by Andrea Richards, published by Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, California, 2005 Mar 8, 2022
The 2012 film Frances Ha written by partners Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach is great to watch if you are not broke, single and searching for a job or a purpose. If you are any of those things (or perhaps just a Master’s student who is trying not to stress …
Like a well-tailored suit, The Outfit (2022, dir. Graham Moore) is streamlined and unpretentious. The film follows a former Savile Row ‘cutter’ Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance) plying his trade out of a shop in Chicago. Mar 8, 2022
Kenneth Branagh’s second Agathie Christie adaptation with the famous French detective, Hercule Poirot (of course, played by Branagh himself) brings another well-known story of murder and intrigue in an opulent, faraway setting to the big screen with an undeniably star-studded cast. Mar 8, 2022
In 2013, Phoebe Waller-Bridge introduced the world to Fleabag as a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2016, the show was adapted for the screen for – tragically – only two seasons. Mar 8, 2022
“Just about a year ago I was on my way to Havana; the birds were singing, the sky was blue, and I said to the big mug in the next pew, ‘I need a couple of hundred dollars big boy’, and he said, in my pants pocket.” Mar 8, 2022
You’d think with a decades-long career under her belt, Emma Thompson would be out of ways to surprise us, but she proves us wrong with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022, dir. Sophie Hyde). Mar 8, 2022
All About Eve (1950, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) has one of the most memorable film lines. Bette Davis in full anger mode, eyes flashing, says ominously: “Fasten your seatbelts – it’s going to be a bumpy night.” Mar 8, 2022
Ridley Scott’s 2021 film The Last Duel really tries to convince its audience that it is a feminist film. The story is centered around the rape of Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer), and it recounts this event from three perspectives. First, the husband Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), then the …
The Souvenir (2019, dir. Joanna Hogg) is a different take on what it means to love someone with a substance addiction. The film follows Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a privileged young filmmaker who falls for Antony (Tom Burke), a functioning heroin addict. Mar 8, 2022
I can say with confidence that 1932’s Rain is a film that changed my viewing habits forever, encouraging me to delve deeper into 1930s Hollywood and discover the tough, smart women at its heart. Mar 8, 2022
Lucile Hadzihalilovic导演的作品《纯真》（2004）讲述的是以艾瑞斯（Zoé Auclair）和比安卡（Bérangère Haubruge）为代表的一群少女的故事。 Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s film Innocence (2004) tells the story of a group of girls represented by Iris (Zoé Auclair) and Bianca (Bérangère Haubruge). Mar 8, 2022
Amy March is a pain. Even her creator, Louisa May Alcott, more or less describes her as such in her much-loved novel, Little Women. The novel follows the four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – as they come of age in Concord, Massachusetts. Mar 8, 2022
Director Jane Campion regularly champions female protagonists in her work, situating her characters, such as Ada McGrath (The Piano, 1993), Frannie Avery (In The Cut, 2003), or Robin Griffin (Top of the Lake, 2013) in hostile environments. Mar 8, 2022
Greta Gerwig seems to have been the woman in film of the past decade. Starting out as an actress and writer, she has fully morphed into a writer-director with her solo cinematic debut Lady Bird (2017). Mar 8, 2022
I was 11 when I first saw Jennifer’s Body (2009), and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. As I got older, I realized there were other films that also use the young woman becoming monstrous as a metaphor for coming of age – Ginger Snaps …
David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s hugely successful crime novel, Gone Girl, starring Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne, arguably created a domino effect in female focused narratives, especially in the crime genre. Mar 8, 2022
Even if you haven’t watched Taken (2008, dir. Pierre Morel), either of its two sequels or seen the meme it inspired, you are likely to be dimly aware of the film’s premise. Mar 8, 2022
Emerald Fennell’s 2020 film, Promising Young Woman, was marketed as “a #MeToo rape revenge thriller with bite”. However, if you’re expecting a cathartic rape revenge thriller with violent vigilante justice, Promising Young Woman will “bite” you. This film both subverts the conventional representation of trauma, causing a phoenix-like moment in …
Prano Bailey-Bond has gained international attention for her first long feature film, Censor (2021), a dark and gritty horror about the strong relationship between cinema and the human mind. Grown on a diet of Twin Peaks, in the depth of a strange Welsh community, Bailey-Bond has always brought to life …
Hi readers! I’m Yvonne Wang, Founder and Chief Editor of The Film Dispatch. I have a broad range of film genre interests: sci-fi, actions, suspense films. Romance and Rom-coms? Yeah probably. Oddly, I always prefer romance/rom-com TV dramas than films because I feel human emotions and relationships involving romantic love …
When we decided to write a short article about one of our favourite films, I decided to write about Amadeus (Forman, 1984), an adaptation of the play by Peter Shaffer about the rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and Mozart’s eventual death. Feb 19, 2022
Personally, I don’t find it cliché when people refer to the ‘magic’ of movies because my goal when watching a movie is to be bewitched. I want to fall under the spell of the screen, to forget the outside world and even – if possible – my own name. Every …
Possibly my favourite film of all time is Atonement, Joe Wright’s 2007 adaptation of my favourite book of all time by Ian McEwan. It is the stunningly heart-breaking tale of a young girl making an irreversible mistake that will ruin the lives of her sister and her lover forever. The …
The nominees for the 75th BAFTA Film Awards were announced Thursday 3rd February 2022, with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts revealing their selections for the best of film from 2021. Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune (2020) led the pack with 11 nominations, including Best Film and Adapted …
The poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote ‘Man, live poetically’ at a time of poverty and sickness, exhorted us to search for the poetry of life, whether we are in a state of mediocrity or we have already achieved so much that we have nothing more to strive for. Feb 14, …
Film is one of the main forms of entertainment for the public during holidays. There are always some films more suitable for a certain group to watch on a particular holiday. Naturally, there are also films inappropriate to a holiday! Spoilers ahead. Feb 14, 2022
Streaming services give cinephiles and casual viewers access to thousands of films across every genre. If you’re willing to subscribe to several, you can see a wide cross-section of titles. Browsing the endless selection can take as long as actually watching a film for some. But it’s those times when …
One of the most influential yet most overlooked aspects of film ideology is the psychological perspective. Several people that I briefly interviewed described a common experience of having a highly unpredictable emotional state. They tend to show empathy and identify themselves as the character within a particular film. More importantly, …
From a professional perspective, A Monster Calls (2016) may not be a masterpiece. But, I am going to praise it highly. The film follows Conor (Lewis MacDougall), a young boy whose mother has been diagnosed with a terminal illness but finds comfort in a tree monster. This film is relatable …
The Color of Pomegranates is a 1969 Armenian film directed by Sergei Parajanov. The film, which depicts the story of an eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour, is not biographical but a poem about the poet’s images. The film uses lots of symbolism and metaphor to depict 18th century Armenia and the poet’s …
In Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (2010), an old man dies and his lamb is left to die alone under a tree. The tree is then cut down as a prop for a festival. Finally, the wood is burnt to make charcoal which is then distributed to many households …
Nearly a hundred years ago, a muscular young actor-director named Buster Keaton risked his life and limb to entertain moviegoers in his film Sherlock Jr (1924). The film follows a movie projectionist that dreams himself into a film. Today, it still thrills. I found myself saying: ‘HOW did they do …
The 2015 documentary The Wolfpack follows the Angulo brothers living in New York City. What sets the Angulo brothers apart from other kids in their neighbourhood is that they have never left it. Their father – Oscar Angulo – controls when and if they leave the apartment so intensely that, …
The ‘parallel’ in the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021) is confounding. Although we do see the stories of two mothers, their individual maternal trajectories are anything but parallel. Feb 14, 2022
Aurel’s Josep (2020) biographically maps the life of Josep Bartolí, Catalan political cartoonist and unionist, through the memories of Serge: an ex-Gendarne camp guard, who interacted with Bartolí during his time as a refugee in a French concentration camp. Serge’s voiced memories are interpreted by his grandson’s attentive imagination so …
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000) is an artistic masterpiece. From Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung’s acting, to the lighting and composition of the frames, the film is elaborately composed to render the elegance of Eastern beauty and, at the same time, sadness. Feb 14, 2022
