FREE CINEMA NOW

#InformedImages is a Free Cinema Now series that studies and brings to light influential films and other examples of moving images that informed and inspired specific visuals in later works. By the time Terrence Malick 's first feature film Badlands debuted in 1973, Andrei Tarkovsky had already made Ivan's Childhood (1962),  Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris (1972). It's obvious that Malick was one of several 1970s filmmakers who came up on Tarkovsky's work, no doubt influenced and moved by the Russian auteur's moving images. Badlands  (and Malick's follow-up film Days of Heaven ) had a meditative and introspective quality that was elevated by stirring images of the natural world -- a Tarkovsky concoction if there ever was one. Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror was a turning point for both the filmmaker and the films it would influence going forward, since The Mirror broke the rules of what a traditional narrative should look like and how a story could ...

An old friend and colleague of mine from my days as an A.V. Club writing intern at The Onion newspaper (almost) ten years ago now recently wrote me a Facebook post with an ingenious trailer mashup idea: reconstructing the Wonder Woman into a Terrence Malick film. Rory Jobst 's note even had the mashup movie title ready to go:   So with that, I was off to the editing races. In the process of cutting the video together, I noticed some of the imagery from Patty Jenkins ' 2017 Wonder Woman film was ironically Malick-ian in its poetic and elegiac visuals. Wonder Woman may be one of this summer's biggest blockbusters, but it sure as hell can make its way into an art-house theater on the heels of my latest mashup trailer! And this is not the first time I've re-imagined Wonder Woman in the vision of a legendary film auteur. Three years ago, I created Wonder Woman Under The Influence , which was cut to the style of the trailer of John Cassavetes ' 1974 dr...

While many were quick to dismiss 2016 as an altogether terrible year--largely due to the year rounding out with TV celeb Donald Trump as the President Elect--it wasn't a throwaway year for the movies. During a time of national unrest and uncertainty, the narratives that graced the silver screen beamed with characters, ideas and themes of unfettered hope...for better or for worse. Whether it was the harsh lesson of growing up and having your heart broken ( Café Society ) or choosing to live a lie in exchange for short-term happiness ( The Light Between Oceans ), the individuals we followed in the cinema were the silver screen embodiment of our unabashed urges to make that jump, to take a leap of faith and step away from our secure existence and reach out to the unknown. The most striking image of the year came in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival , when linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) approached a white void in the form of an alien wall inside of a UFO vessel -- an almost perf...