New on the Current: Bong Joon Ho’s creative process and a trip to the cinematic afterlife

By rahmat hidayat

Monday, April 26, 2021

Plus: an in-depth look at Hindi cinema pioneer Bimal Roy and a first glimpse at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

The Current HIGHLIGHTS APRIL 25, 2021 A roundup of recent articles from Criterion's online magazine. Happy reading!

Visions of a New India Bimal Roy's Unique Take on the Postcolonial Moment. To reflect the nation's tumultuous transition into modernity, the pioneering director forged a path between the realist tendencies of the era's art-house cinema and the pleasures of popular genre filmmaking. By Devika Girish WATCH Five of Roy's films are now playing on the Criterion Channel.

The Great Beyond How Movies Imagine the Afterlife. From Here Comes Mr. Jordan to Defending Your Life (which we recently released in a new edition), cinematic depictions of the hereafter often hinge on widely shared anxieties and uncertainties about our earthly existence. By Donna Bowman WATCH Special-effects artist and historian Craig Barron explains the ingenuity that went into designing the stairway to heaven in A Matter of Life and Death (pictured above).

The Devil in the Details Inside the Making of Memories of Murder. In the latest entry in our series 10 Things I Learned, the producer of our new release of this unnerving crime procedural shares details about director Bong Joon Ho's meticulous approach to visual style and the lengths to which actor Kim Sang Kyung went in order to portray his character. By Curtis Tsui READ MORE Critic and novelist Ed Park explores the political resonances of Memories of Murder in an essay featured in our edition.  Out of Place What The Long Day Closes Reveals About the Melancholy of Not Belonging. Obsessed with the lure of memory and the stigma of social otherness, Terence Davies's masterpiece inspires this writer to take a winding journey into her own peripatetic past. By Ella Taylor Illustration by Xia Gordon WATCH In an episode of the Criterion Channnel series Observations on Film Art, professor Kristin Thompson examines how Davies uses dissolves to create the movie's elegiac tone.

OLDIE BUT GOODIE "To me, what was interesting about Herman Mankiewicz was not that he was in conflict with anyone. It's that he was in conflict with everyone. Including himself." —David Fincher on the subject of his film Mank, the most-nominated movie competing for Oscars tonight

THE DAILY This Year at Cannes Leos Carax's Latest Will Open the Festival. The director's long-awaited follow-up to Holy Motors is a love story starring Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, and Simon Helberg. READ MORE David Hudson takes a look at another beloved festival: Il Cinema Ritrovato.

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