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.

The Nightcrawler – Review by Swea

Nightcrawler Review

Dan Gilroy’s 2014 movie Nightcrawler follows Lou Bloom through the night-clad streets of Los Angeles as he makes his way into the ethical edges of the stringer business. Lou stumbles into this career verging between freelance journalism and bystander by coincidence. As he watches ambulances and police taking care of a car accident, a guy with a camera runs past him to film not only the crash site but the victims as well. This quick explanation is enough to hook Lou: He provides film material for the highest bidding news station. Lou jumps right into the business with a cheap camera and an intern hired with little white lies. His talent for stretching the truth does not only lead him straight to success, together with his sort of detached ruthlessness it gets him into more than questionable moral territory.

The Lobster – Review by Annika

Review: “The Lobster” (2015)

by Annika Schönwitz

“The Lobster” is one of those films whose premises sound so incredibly absurd that you can’t help but approach them with a good chunk of skepticism. A closer look, however, pays off:

Imagine a society yielded to an unemotional dystopia in which living without a partner is considered a crime. Singles that are exposed are given 45 days under supervision to find a mate, otherwise they will be transformed into an animal of their choice.

Precinema—Cinema—Postcinema

Stages	Representation	Features
Pre-cinema era	Optical toys -Phenakistiscope -Zoetrope	Ø Simple devices/content Ø Repetition of single action Ø Disks or strips as carrier Ø Active viewer
Cinema era	Moving-picture show Film/Movie shown in cinema -movie theatre	Ø Immersive experience(darkness, huge screen) Ø Long-lasting narration Ø (roll) film as carrier Ø Passive viewer
Post-cinema era	Online digital videos/films -Internet(Netflix)	Ø Convenient watching experience(anytime and anywhere) Ø Viewing in open environment Ø Pixels, or more accurately, binary data(0 and 1) as carrier Ø Quite active viewer

The Lobster – Review by Anna

The Lobster, with its dystopian ideals of love, captures a bleak and dark world. Ironically, this world is devoid of any actual love. Visually bleak, as well as emotionally, The Lobster is able to capture emotions within an emotionless world. Camera angles work to provide glimpses into the severity of life and mysterious musical strings accompany characters during intense of chaotic scenes, even though not much action is portrayed on screen. Dialogue is simplistic, yet packed with a punch that offers more to the story at first glance. This dark drama tries to capture the future of society within a very simplistic way of shooting and it delivers. However, with an open ending the audience is left with an uneasy feeling and a search for answers that cannot be found, much like that of the film. The film is left waiting, much like that of the characters in their lives, and the audience. (Anna)

The Nightcrawler – review by Anna

The Nightcrawler

Review by Anna:

Nightcrawler, a term used to identify an individual or group of people that film crime scenes and horrific accidents that happen during the night, is a film that questions just how far one might go to get the perfect shot. Louis Bloom, a currently unemployed low-life, gets entangled within the world of nightcrawlers. He starts out with a small camcorder and constantly gets to the scenes just a minute too late. However, as the film progresses, so does Louis’ knowledge and skills of nightcrawling. Perhaps the only redeeming factor of Louis’ character is that he is played by Jake Gyllenhal whose ability to portray an array of deadpan expressions is outstanding. The otherwise boring nature of the film is contrasted by the accidents documented by the nightcrawers. AS the accidents become more violent and disturbing, so does the main character, willing to do absolutely anything to get the perfect shot. Louis is not afraid to endanger the lives of people around him, clearly a parallel to the violence he documents every night. Ironically, this delusion and narcissism are what lead to Louis’ ultimate success instead of downfall. There are no consequences for Louis’ actions, just the people he surrounds himself with to no fault of their own.