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The Japanese director  Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been directing films for both the big screen and television since the mid-1970s. Kurosawa is not exactly genre-specific but he's probably best known for his Japanese horror films, like The Cure and Pulse (which Wes Craven later wrote an English adaptation for in 2006). However, I find Kurosawa a more interesting filmmaker when he steps out of his popular horror genre, like he did with his 2008 masterpiece Tokyo Sonata . That film was a straightforward drama on the surface, observing a family in disarray after the patriarch loses his job but doesn't have the stomach to share that information with his wife; it curdled with an implosive sadness and palpable urgency beneath the surface. Kurosawa depicted the everyday struggle as a sort of a horror spectacle, but with dialed down theatrics in order to let us feel his characters angst and uncertainty. It's really a remarkable film. Now Kurosawa returns to a more visually spectacul...

Rowena Santos Aquino 's video essay "Antonioni's Walkabout" looks at how the formal act of walking emotes both practical and big postwar experiences in three of Michaelango Antonioni 's films:  L'Avventura (1960),  La Notte (1961) and  L'Eclisse (1962). Abandoning the traditional academic technique of using voiceover narration to make its points clear, Aquino subtly fades into sentence fragments at the bottom of the screen, giving the viewer enough time to process the moving image as well as understand the given footnote. It's an appropriate strategy and one that lingers in the mind, much like Antonioni's films do. In short, there's a staying power to simply suggesting an idea. Watch the video via Aquino's FilmStillLives Vimeo page:

Steven Soderbergh 's latest television project Mosaic (currently available on HBO ) utilizes a mobile app that's lets viewers decide how they view the show's story (e.g. choosing a specific character's vantage point) while also supplementing the viewing experience with immersive content available only through the mobile app. Soderbergh has always been on the cutting edge when it comes to innovative storytelling and while viewers are just starting to wrap their head around his HBO project, the Oscar-winning filmmaker just released the trailer for his next feature film, a thriller titled Unsane (starring recent SAG Award winner Claire Foy ), which was shot entirely on an iPhone. Yes, an iPhone. The film's website provides the following synopsis: "A young woman is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she is confronted by her greatest fear — but is it real or is it a product of her delusion?" The trailer for Unsane  is below and y...

#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 ...

Assistant Camera and Video Essayist  Zackery Ramos-Taylor 's latest video takes the side-by-side visual essay form to exciting frontiers with his fully comprehensive "Based on a True Story." Those who follow my own video essay work on this site will know that I'm an enthusiastic supporter of this kind of visual style (e.g. my #InformedImages video series). Ramos-Taylor describes his inspiration for "Based on a True Story" (via  Vimeo) : "How does Hollywood interpret History? This video compares historical/found footage of moments in history with Hollywood’s attempt to reenact these moments. Oftentimes Hollywood categorize’s these films with the overused tagline “Based on a True Story” in order to show a dramatized retelling of these historical moments. Production design, costumes, props, blocking, and body language are several factors that determines the authenticity of these moments as true or far from it. Ranging from interviews to sports highl...

Denis Villeneuve 's Arrival , which was one of the very best films of 2016 , told the compelling story of a linguist (played by Amy Adams ) who is recruited by the U.S. Army to help establish communication with alien invaders before an all out world war breaks out. Of course, the real plot of Arrival was more about the complexities of human affection and yearning, as well as exploring the costs of love; the film is bookended by nonlinear vignettes that reinforce the theme behind  Alfred Lord Tennyson 's “'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” quote. Now Luxembourg filmmaker  Lukas Grevis   takes two of the film's key topics -- words and love -- and has made an introspective video essay that plays like a lucid memory (which ties into Arrival 's nonlinear structure) on the emotional arc of the film. Here is Grevis' video below.

On the morning of Tuesday January 23, 2018, cinematographer Rachel Morrison made Oscar history by becoming the first female director of photography to be nominated for the Best Cinematography Academy Award . Morrison's exceptional photography work in Mudbound  ( read my review ) was rightfully acknowledged but it's crazy to think that in nearly a century's time, a woman has not been honored in the cinematography category. Now that Morrison has made history, we can hope that going forward having a female nominee won't be such a rarity. To help commemorate such a watershed moment, I went back through Morrison's filmography to showcase her beautiful and sharply unique cinematography over the years. Her body of work boasts television and documentary credits but for the purposes of my video essay, I focused on her feature film work starting with 2007's indie comedy Palo Alto, CA . The canvas of her resume ranges from small independent films to singular works lik...