Top Ten List 2

The Most Visually Stunning Films of the Past Five Years

Tara Hussein

By the time we hear "visually stunning films" is easy to link this with films that miss real content, and instead are based mainly on images without describing anything truly important. The fact that these movies are very impressive visually doesn't mean that they don't yet tell an enormous story.

1- Laurence Anyways (2012)

     Laurence Anyways is to be considered one of the most stunning achieved films. The film is an awesome intense, emotional and triggering piece of cinema. It demonstrates Queer’s topic in an interesting way through the nice harmony between the image and the sound, tackling a powerful und an affective love story, presenting a dynamic and a complicated relationship. Although the film is visually stunning, style does not overbear the substance. The strength of the visual is what enriches this film. An example of this is the sequence of the colored clothes raining from the sky. Such strong visual images are created to carry the audiences through and to be stuck in their minds.

Trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZV5uPM2Bls

Wild Tales — Review by Anna Marquardt

Wild Tales

Review by Anna

Wild Tales is exactly what it sounds like: wild. The film, an anthology of five different wild tales, can't really be put into one category to analyze. However, it is a good depiction of post cinema. With themes of the human condition and what humans will do when faced with certain situations, the film engages the audience with its unique topics. From the possibility of murder to simple road rage, Wild Tales questions just how far someone is willing to go and then pushes those limits even further. In the opening sequence, a plane full of people are all unknowingly lured by the same person onto the same plane because they have somehow wronged him. While this theme might seem depressing, there are elements of comedy to ease the tension of what is about to happen. This post cinematic element is used in almost every tale that is told in this film. While each of the protagonists are faced with dangerous or frustrating circumstances, there is always an aspect of comedy that relaxes the audience and causes the tension to fade for just a moment. The tales are wild, crazy, and almost unbelievable, but they are captivating. The audience can't look away, afraid they might miss something crazy that is about to happen. The characters at first look like ordinary citizens but then something quickly happens to throw them out of the “normal” category and into a crazy situation. Even if you don't want to root for them, you end up feeling some sort of connection to the character currently on screen. Wild Tales is able to hold the audience's attention in suspense while also laughing at the incredulous story telling.

Top Ten List 1

Top Ten List 1

Katya

The year of 2016 was full of successful movie releases around the world and the team of Clueless Cineasts has decided to keep up with trends and came up with the TOP 10 best film productions that you can’t miss.

1. Arrival

Who would have thought that it is still possible to come up with a new aliens-are- arriving- to-the-Earth story, drop the cheesy lines and even make it meaningful? Well, what do you know, it is possible, and this movie is a living proof to it. Without giving up too many spoilers we just want to point out that the director of the movie is  Denis Villeneuve and if you know his works you can imagine the captivating atmosphere of every movie that he creates,  the Arrival wasn’t the exception. Gradually, along with the main characters we become researchers and detectives and that makes us so much involved in the story that we are no longer just watching it, we are experiencing it. Such an effect is created by a combination of acting, music, camera work, acting ... Villeneuve picked up a great team!

Dictionary for Post-Cinema

Post-cinema

(Defined by Lilean Buhl)

“Post-cinema“ is the term media critics use when referring to the media landscape of the 21st century. Denson (2016) characterizes the term as “The collection of media, and the mediation of life forms that ‘follows’ the broadly cinematic regime of the 20^th century”. Were television and cinema the main media through which consumers received moving images in the 20^th century, the domination of these forums has been broken down into a new paradigm by forces of technological advancement, globalization, mobility, and consumership. A break with as well as a reformulation of the 20^th century-paradigm, post-cinematic art has made its way into theaters, TV broadcasts, serials, apps, games, and other channels of consumption. How these new forms of reception influence the production and dissemination of cultural content is one of the central questions of post-cinematic thought. The term also works towards formulating the current media landscape as exactly that – a landscape, diverse and multifaceted in its characteristics, but interconnected in its conceptual roots.

The Nightcrawler – Review by Wenchao

Review of Nightcrawler

Chen Wenchao

  Just as we can see from the title of the film, the protagonist Lou is an antihero who is immersed in the dark night and tries to record every dark side of the society in order to get success in his own career.

At the beginning of the film, he is just a thief who makes a living by stealing some copper wire at night. In other words, he is a nobody who acts on his own, has no job, no family or friends. But even at that situation, he is still conceited. When he failed to sell the things he stole to the manager at a price he wanted, he even claimed that their “business relationship” need to be changed and that is the last offer he can accept.

Actually, It’s not difficult to find his positive character: he is a brainy quick-learner and has persuasive style of conversation.

The Lobster— Review by Liliean

Review of Lobster

Lilean Buhl

All dystopias take elements of contemporary life and create a world which is constructed with an emphasis on these elements, highlighting their status, their ambivalence in our reality through absurd exaggeration of their meaningfulness. In the bleak world of The Lobster, it is dating, love, and the pursuit of togetherness that gets the treatment. The colors are earthy, the music, if there at all, remains eerie, and the voices defeated --- in The Lobster, what is said (usually ultra-literal commentary) and how it is said (in tone so robotic and vocabulary as detached from human communication as we know possible, such as on the other end of customer-service hotlines or in language-learning videos) is coherently aiming at absurdism through literalness. The actors almost play humans, but not quite. The plot almost makes sense, but not quite. The Lobster is programmatic in its constant, multi-levelled satirizing of love and relationships --- its commentary is so direct, in fact, that it arrives at an accomplished satire in the first five minutes. What follows, however, takes a hundred minutes to tell you the same joke, with the same straight face, a hundred times over. If you loved the joke in the first place, you might make it.

The Nightcrawler— Review by Liliean

  Review of Nightcrawler

Lilean Buhl

That a film can age well, like a good wine or cheese, is well documented. But does that only hold true after a movie’s premiere? Nightcrawler, an eerie, funny, crass, genre-busting thriller, comedy, social reality film, and psychological study, lay in director and writer Dan Gilroy’s desk for almost three decades. It is a film primarily about a sociopathic, mysterious genius/whacko (Jake Gyllenhaal) who gets into the stringing game with cold zeal, treading on everybody in his way and sacrificing close relationships (he has no friends) for his obsession of selling ever more drastic material of the night before’s murders, crashes, and catastrophes to voyeuristic news stations. The movie is also an oversubscription of US news channels, where gore and private suffering are the hottest commodities – an exaggeration because the action, like Gyllenhaal’s character, zooms in at the most precarious crime scenes in a toxic environment it, generally, portrays accurately. But it is Nightcrawler’s feel that makes it a film worth watching, a feel for atmosphere and setting (and, to a lesser extent, its actors’ performances) that might well have profited from ripening in its author’s mind for 29 years.