It’s a meme nowadays for people to exclaim that, should the unthinkable happen—nuclear warfare, an asteroid hitting earth, zombie apocalypse, et cetera—they’d rather just die than survive, the relative comfort of the former outweighing the hardships of the latter. This certainly makes sense; the glut of media centered on people desperately trying to survive after a catastrophe doesn’t make it look fun.

But apparently there is a community of people who not only hope to survive, but will attempt to…

Some of the shots in this are so beautiful I was moved to tears. (Ironically most of said shots did not include half-naked men, though I enjoyed those, too.)

Soderbergh really used the MAGIC MIKE films to flex—no pun intended—his (or should I say Peter Andrews'?) masterful aestheticism. I appreciate both how different this feels from the first two and how different at times it feels from itself. Lots of formal experimentation and shifting tonalities that keep it from being…

Originally published on Cine-File.

It’s clear right away that Adéla Komrzý and Tomas Bojar’s perceptive consideration of the several-day long entrance exam at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague is similar to Frederick Wiseman’s cogitations of storied institutions. It becomes even more so when shots of a janitor cleaning the schools’ halls punctuate the low-stakes “action” of the subject at hand, this being one of Wiseman’s signature devices; the effect is similar, helping to underscore, however gently, the fundamental…