Essays

A collection of 54 posts

Baltic Cinema

Rolands Kalniņš: riding the Baltic New Wave with “Latvia’s Godard”

One of the most important Latvians to ever stand behind a camera.

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Sinners

Ryan Coogler gets dangerously close to the horrifying center of American culture over the course of the single night — close enough for Sinners to dance with America’s original sin.

Essays

Libera te Tutemet: The Three Musketeers (2011)

Anderson at his most idealistic.

Essays

The Klassiki Podcast: Jonas Mekas — a Lithuanian abroad

I was honored to join host Sam Goff on the Klassiki Podcast to discuss the life and work of the Lithuanian avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

Essays

Libera te Tutamet: Pompeii (2014)

One of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 21st century.

Essays

Year Ender: Joshua Polanski's Top Ten Films of 2024

In a year darkened by ethnic cleansing, global conflict, and hopeless elections, it’s beautiful that beauty, more than depravity, captivates the minds of our best artists.

Essays

The top 10 dirtiest movies of 2024 [Nickel Boys]

No mainstream film this year was more uniquely cinematic than RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys.

Essays

The 28th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival

BIFAN’s embrace of sexuality is one example of its willingness to reach for something extra.

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Essays

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice Of Blood and Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness

Essays

Two sides of the same coin?

Deborah Correa’s debut feature The War Between (2024), presents an usual setting for a Western, set in Arizona Territory early on in the American Civil War. It finds two soldiers from opposing allegiances, each stranded in the desert following a battle, forced to tolerate one another for the best

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Essays

The Musicality of The Beast

Essays

Style as Political Substance, or The Bosnian Master: The Case for Danis Tanović

Danis Tanović might be the most personal, visually compelling, and thematically thoughtful political auteur working in European cinema. And regrettably, his name will largely go unrecognized by even the most globetrotting and well-watched of cinephiles. With very few exceptions, Western film lovers have failed to properly appreciate Tanović’s best

Essays

The 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF)

The only International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) A-list film festival in Northern Europe or the Baltic, Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival just wrapped up its 27th year and celebrated by breaking all major attendance records from the festival’s history, as PӦFF director Tiina Lokk-Tramberg shared

Essays

Year Ender: Top Ten Films of 2023

The best films of the year creatively resist the studio destruction of art and suppression of vision with bold statements of visual-sonic distinction

Essays

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — Peter Jackson

For better and for worse, Jackson’s demonstration of episodic filmmaking’s ability to have its cake and eat it too has proved an artistic decision that continues to reverberate through 21st-century blockbuster filmmaking.

Essays

The Last Wife — Victor Vu

At its best, The Last Wife calls back to a different era of filmmaking.

Essays

Fritz on Fridays: The Spiders — The Golden Sea

I try not to interpret Lang, or all Austrian and / or German cinema for that matter, through the tragedy of the Shoah and fascism more broadly, but The Golden Sea makes that hard through the confession of the Incan leader, who offers “a sacrifice to the sun that rises and promises to make our people

Essays

Fritz on Fridays: Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

At the absolute maximum, there are but a handful of filmmakers in the history of the seventh art who have left a greater mark on the medium than Fritz Lang. I’m even hesitant to identify a single filmmaker with a definitive case for being more influential over the course

Essays

Fritz on Fridays: <i>The Big Heat</i> (1953)

Beginning today, on the first Friday of every month, this column by critic Joshua Polanski will feature a short review or essay on a film directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), the great Austrian “Master of Darkness.” Occasionally (but not too occasionally), Fritz on Fridays will also feature interviews and conversations

Essays

Les Indésirables and Covid-19

“The real problem [or] the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police — that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support.” Those are

Essays

Observations on What Made Jackie Chan the Greatest

Jackie Chan, at his peak, was our greatest entertainer.

Essays

Notes on the 27th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival

We live in a digital, uber-modern world: that’s the message from the 27th Bucheon Fantastic Film Festival. Following the global trauma of pandemic isolation, the films I viewed at this year’s festival overwhelmingly pointed to the shared anxieties of a post-pandemic world, including but not limited to the

Essays

Some Changes…

As you may have noticed, I rebranded my personal film website from Transcendent Cinema to No Gods Left: Toward A Millennium of Cinema. That’s because I have something else in store for that project and that URL, which will be evolving into a team effort with a globally and

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The Post-Colonial World of Bong Joon-Ho

Bong's films are postcolonial in the sense that they often reflect the Korean context by depicting the United States as a neo-colonial empire; however, his postcolonial messages are largely dependent on a reversal of American genre expectations, and, as a result, his films still dialogue with the co

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