The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Kenji Fujishima

Kenji Fujishima

Some of the first things about Total Recall I latched onto as a young cinephile were its dazzling production design and special effects, its breathless action sequences, its over-the-top violence—in short, its surface....Today, though, my appreciation for Paul Verhoeven's mind trip goes beyond simple nostalgia, and hinges on how its seductive look and immediate visceral pleasures are wily in their concealment of grand themes.

Contributed to: Slant Magazine, The Daily Targum, In Review Online, The Wall Street Journal, The Home News Tribune and The L Magazine.

Influences: Pauline Kael, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, Armond White, Fernando F. Croce, Dave Kehr, Richard Brody 

Born in Queens, NY and raised in East Brunswick, N.J., Kenji Fujishima (December 4, 1985-) has slyly become one of the most reliably logical and easily digestible critics in the US. Soft-spoken, kind and gentle, his unfailingly pleasant demeanor conceals a ravenous intellect and a style that effortlessly dances a step ahead of the reader. 

In his own words: "My interest in cinephilia and film criticism came relatively late in the game compared to many of my colleagues. I was much more into music—classical, for the most part—than movies early on, and when I started playing the piano and the violin during my elementary-school years, I initially thought I’d be pursuing musical performance when I grew up. In those years, though, I also read The Newark Star-Ledger’s film reviews pretty regularly…and then, probably sometime during middle or junior high school, I borrowed a copy of Pauline Kael’s final collection of film reviews, Movie Love (1991), from my local library in East Brunswick, N.J. That was when I had my first film-criticism “eureka!” moment, when, upon her recommendation, I decided to give Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets a shot on VHS and not only found the film to be a quietly mind-blowing experience, but found her ecstatic review of it to beautifully mirror my own feelings. Not only was I hooked on her criticism, but thanks to the Internet, I was able to discover other crucial voices on my own: Jonathan Rosenbaum (especially for introducing me to the work of world-cinema auteurs like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami and Béla Tarr), Matt Zoller Seitz (for his focus on finding meaning in technique), Armond White (for simply his fire-and-brimstone polemical style, whether or not I agreed with his stances or not), Fernando F. Croce (for his lyrical economy of expression), and others."

"Still, it wasn’t until after my sophomore year of my undergraduate college education at Rutgers University—after an initial two years of agonizing over my choice of major—that I decided to focus my energies on film criticism. Technically, I ended up majoring in journalism with a minor in cinema studies—but I became active with Rutgers’ daily newspaper, The Daily Targum, writing film reviews for them before becoming the film editor of its weekly Inside Beat entertainment section. One year, for the Targum, I decided it might be fun to get a film critic’s perspective on the year’s Oscar race; it is for that reason that I decided to reach out to Matt Zoller Seitz, then Newark Star-Ledger television critic and New York Press film critic. In some ways, that feature opened the door for my entry into The House Next Door when Seitz decided to open up what was initially his own personal blog to various outside contributors…and essentially, that’s how I got my foot in the door of this business we call film criticism."

And we can all be grateful he did. Since his debut, Kenji has kept to a handful of outlets, releasing one sturdily written piece after another. Like the classical music he loves so much, there's a grace to his diction. His sentence structure, especially his interplay of verbs and adjectives, move with a ballerina's seemingly effortless flow. Look at this sentence in his review of Onur Tukel's Summer of Blood: "...it's becoming apparent that Onur Tukel is developing a distinct on-screen persona: that of a cynical motormouth whose disaffected hipster veneer masks a core selfishness." The meter is delectable, reading as smoothly in one's head as it does out loud. There's an old world construction to it. You'd expect to read something with that confident rhythm from one of the romantic poets. Read this passage from his review of Quiz Show and feel it tugging you down like a steady river current: "Though the film’s vision of capitalistic exploitation is damning, thankfully the filmmakers don’t forgo the flawed, wounded human beings at the heart of this sobering tale in favor of political point-making." Easygoing but with such urgent force behind it. He's a conductor, compelling the proper dynamic from the orchestra at his fingertips. 

On Dinosaur 13

To some extent, Petersen's use of a wide aspect ratio and Morton's emphatic score takes its cues from Larson's passion—the expansive frame more given to exuding an openness to natural environments, the music expressing perhaps more than Larson himself is willing to outwardly show (he remains a generally stoic camera subject throughout). Perhaps that's why its final shot—of Larson going back out into the desert, pickax in hand, in an extreme wide shot—is as surprisingly affecting as it is. Larson may not have ended up with exactly the outcome he desired (and the film vehemently argues that he deserved better than the outcome he got), but his love of fossil-hunting at least remained thankfully undimmed through it all.

On Sunshine Superman

Boenish’s infectious enthusiasm generally tended to spread to the people around him—and damned if it doesn’t get to us as well. Perhaps the sheer preponderance of Boenish’s self-shot footage is key to the effectiveness of Sunshine Superman. It’s one thing to hear Boenish spouting inspirational platitudes about thinking outside societal boxes and following your bliss; it’s quite another, however, to see the man himself putting his philosophies into mad practice, and moreover, to see his own filmed results as thrilling illustration. In the end, it doesn’t matter so much that the reenactments can sometimes be cheesy, the pacing in the second half somewhat lumbering, the hagiography occasionally oppressive. Such doubts are bound to be swept away when faced with the spectacle of real people momentarily suspended in air, engulfed by their surroundings, experiencing the intoxicating freedom of defying the laws of society and nature. Sunshine Superman may not inspire anyone to climb up and fall from a tall building, but the underlying liberating ethos behind such devil-may-care behavior comes across resonantly and passionately.

On Cinderella

Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella is, for the most part, a straightforward retelling of the fairy tale, and the Walt Disney Pictures imprimatur ensures that the filmmaker forgoes the more violent moments in the Brothers Grimm version of the story (no one cuts their toes off here in order to fit into Cinderella's glass slipper; to see that, you'd have to turn to Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods). Which isn't to say that the film doesn't have its own distinct virtues. Dante Ferretti's color production design and Sandy Powell's wide-ranging costumes (the black-with-green-stripes design on wicked stepmother Lady Tremaine's dress offers an expressive contrast with Cinderella's initial plain pink dress) are so intoxicatingly colorful that every shot has the immersiveness of a dream. But it's the emotional reality with which Branagh, screenwriter Chris Weitz, and his cast ground this Cinderella that makes it as affecting as it is. 

Branagh fully understands the societal critique underlying the tale, and brings it out into the open: The world that surrounds Cinderella is one in which surface appearances matter more than inner beauty, class status is a kind of mental prison from which only a few are able to break free, and climbing up the social ladder is believed to be the only sure route toward happiness....

....Most of all, though, this Cinderella resonates as an ideological battle between Cinderella's (Lily James) natural optimism and Lady Tremaine's (Cate Blanchett) viciously calculating pragmatism. While the former ultimately wins out, Branagh isn't above occasionally giving the latter perspective its due. Even as Blanchett generally plays her character to the delicious black-hearted hilt, she does offer fleeting glimpses of the painful life experience that has shaped her appalling current behavior. And though the film sprinkles in those intermittent moments of bitter adult wisdom, Branagh, as with the film's main character, never allows Cinderella to sink into heavy-spiritedness. A sense of play reigns over the proceedings, perhaps encapsulated most amusingly by Helena Bonham Carter's Fairy Godmother, played with a kind of jokey, no-nonsense gleam in her eyes that nevertheless feels completely sincere rather than snarky. That just about sums up the film in a nutshell: It may not reinvent any wheels, but it's been made with enough care and belief in its material that it manages to refresh our relationship to the iconic tale, reminding us of why its message, of kindness triumphing over evil, has endured for so long.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Tina Hassannia

Tina Hassannia
Instead of using the earthy, colorful atmosphere of the museum as an antidote to the brightly lit and sterile hospital scenes, Cohen sticks steadfastly to his thesis and asks us to look more closely at the rhythmic heart monitor and the quiet sounds of IV fluids dropping into its container. Like everything else in the film, they too possess a beauty worth noting.

Contributed to: Slant Magazine, Little White Lies, Movie Mezzanine, Keyframe, Grolsch Film Works, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, Reverse Shot, Guernica, cléo, In Review Online, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Spectrum Culture, AV Club.

Noted champion of: You've Got Mail & Nora Ephron, Abbas Kiarostami, Sohrab Shahid Saless, the Coen Brothers, Errol Morris, Spring Breakers, Whit Stillman.

Influences: Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Foster Wallace, Siegfried Kracauer, Sasha Frere-Jones, Manohla Dargis, David Kehr, Pauline Kael, Hamid Naficy, Molly Haskell, Richard Brody, Fernando F. Croce, Adam Nayman. 


Born in Tehran and raised in Ottawa, Tina Hassannia (April 12, 1984-) has a unique perspective to say the least. Her first piece of criticism was a review of the Arcade Fire album Funeral in the Fulcrum, the student publication at the University of Ottawa. "I was interested in aesthetics in adolescence and attended an arts high school, but other than one savvy drama teacher my influences were mostly music magazines, Pitchfork and XPress, Ottawa's arts weekly. In university I decided to try writing for my campus newspaper and eventually worked my way up to Arts & Culture Editor. After university, I covered music, theatre and comedy for the XPress, but around this time I started to get bored of arts journalism, or as I liked to call it, fluff journalism. I found new cinephile friends who excelled at analyzing music and movies in an earnest, cerebral fashion that I found both intimidating and stimulating. With their suggestion, I took Film Studies at Carleton University. It's perhaps a tad strange that I turned to a medium that was less familiar to me (compared to music and theatre), but film academia was exactly the kind of critical foundation I needed to sharpen my writing skills. I started reviewing movies for In Review Online in 2011 and became more active the next year with my contributions to Spectrum Culture and Not Coming."

Hassannia's integration of technique and global context is stunning, treating films as more than merely works of art, bad or good. Hassannia has done a lot of incredible work on the films of the Iranian directors like Asghar Farhadi, on whom she's written a book, and Abbas Kiarostami and founding hello-cinema.net, a site dedicated to Iranian film. On top of being one of the most accomplished and deeply felt cinematic wellsprings, it's also among the most vital because each statement carries the weight of crisis and torment. From her review of Jafar Panahi's Closed Curtain: Jafar Panahi's harsh sentence from Iranian authorities—his house arrest, restrictions on filmmaking and travel, and communicating with media—have forced the filmmaker to contemplate not only the intellectual struggle that accompanies tyrannical artistic censorship, but its combined psychological and emotional manifestations. Which is a good way of looking at her criticism; a combination of intellectual/aesthetic concerns harmonizing with psychological and emotional ones. She places everything in sociopolitical context, knowing that surefooted ideology gives the purely cinematic merits of a film more weight. She never resorts to hyperbole or easy classification, keeping a respectful distance to preserve the film's achievement, rather than its 'importance.' A sense of history and the notion that we write it with every work of art runs through her work like a main circuit cable, to coin a phrase, and she reads as part essayist/historian in the most exciting fashion. Whether she's talking about Palme d'Or contenders or Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, she writes with formal assurance and accessibility, possessing a clear-eyed view of where art could take us not just as viewers, but as the people who shape the future. 

On The Past
For those Iranians living abroad, the fight for a unified identity remains just as fraught. In some places, like the popular independent media centers in Los Angeles (“Tehrangeles”), one can see a forged Iranian-American identity that has unified the secular, upper-middle-class Iranians who made a mass exodus from their homeland following the revolution. But otherwise, if one looks to the cinematic output as a source of confirmation, the Persian diaspora—based mostly in North America and Europe—suffers from a lack of cohesiveness. Although a handful of Iranian artists have established themselves outside of the country, to date, the creative output of arthouse filmmakers has not helped to forge a united voice or provide an alternative identity for diasporic Iranians. This is not to suggest that their role lies in pioneering such an identity. But their encompassing reach and personal experiences abroad, which many have internalized into their work, present them with opportunities and an audience to articulate the Persian diasporic experience that others don’t have.  To begin answering the question about the cultural identity of The Past, it’s helpful to consider Farhadi’s own goals in creating the film. The director spent two years abroad researching and working on the story. Though initially guided by the cultural differences between Iranians and Europeans in the beginning of his research, Farhadi became increasingly inspired by their similarities. The Past does not contribute to a collective voice for the Iranian community abroad—at least not directly. Though the film details the experience of an Iranian man who once lived in Europe, the story is not focused on his diasporic perspective like with other films in that vein, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Yet in a roundabout way, the film does seem to offer something unique and also entirely essential for the Persian diaspora: the normalization of an Iranian protagonist in a Western film.

On 12 Years A Slave

Using his signature visual composition and deafening sound design, McQueen portrays the harrowing realism of Northrup's experience and the complicated relationships between master and slave, master and master, slave and slave, and so on. The film's most fascinating scenes explore the phenomenon of favoritism and the use of language in defining the scarce rights and dignities of African-American slaves, like the black mistress who tries to sell a younger female slave on the benefits of being her master's concubine. With her nose looking down at the serfs around her, the mistress smugly tells the young woman she could easily come to "manage them all" if she got into her master's good graces. Such characters say and do horrendous things, but the film isn't trying to make some blanket criticism against the different strategies used by American slaves; instead it shows that a complete void and desperation for humane treatment changes people into justifying their actions.

On Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

The independence and tenacity of Ghidorah’s female characters mark the film’s most fascinating elements, particularly noticeable in lead character Naoko, a journalist who beats her colleagues to the scoop in finding the Venusian, whose predictions are one by one coming true. Naoko is the series’ first real heroine, with a resilient independence that has her unbound by relationships to male characters (including her overprotective brother). In fact, she dismisses her family’s insistence that her friend, a professor studying the Ghidorah meteorite, is also her boyfriend. He is simply an acquaintance that can help her land a story, as she values her own career above else. Indeed, her open-mindedness leads her to ask the right questions to the Venusian and the Shobijin fairies that help to uncover the truth about Ghidorah. This particular scene, set in a hotel room – intended to establish exposition about the invincibility of the three-headed monster – is an integral, pivotal point in the narrative. It’s interesting that despite the convenient grouping of the female characters in these closed quarters, the Communist spies sent to assassinate the Princess and who have been stalking the hotel room, are treated like distractions in scenes such as this one (easily tricked by the Shobijin fairies) rather than operating like the James Bond-like villains they so clearly imitate.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce

But what of the miracle (is there another word for it?) of the transcendental finale—another joke, or a sudden, romantic flash from a pugnacious modernist who could fill the screen with barrier after Brechtian barrier and still make us cry for the elderly cleaning lady by her lover's bedside and the battered transvestite baring his soul in the abbatoir?

Contributed to: Slant Magazine, Reverse Shot, Mubi, Film Comment, Fandor, Movie Mezzanine, Cinepassion.org.

Noted Champion of: Kenji Mizoguchi, Kill Bill, Robert Mitchum, José Mojica Marins, Scorpio Rising, Ann Dvorak, Powell & Pressburger, The Naked Kiss, Russ Meyer, Elaine May, Futurama, Georgina Spelvin, Larry Cohen.

Influences: Manny Farber "above all", Andrew Sarris, Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Jorge Luis Borges, J. Hoberman, Robin Wood, and, "for giving me my first taste of prose," João Carlos Marinho.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Fernando F. Croce (April 20, 1977-) is part critic, part poet. His critical life, in brief: I came to film writing during my college days, after years working at various video stores and unsuccessful stabs at poetry and painting (Perhaps that’s why Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma hit me so profoundly, and why I keep making insufferably pretentious references not just to other films, but to other art forms in reviews. I’m a bit obsessed about connections). My first article appeared at the San Jose State University newspaper, The Spartan Daily—a review of the 2000 werewolf thriller Ginger Snaps, which for some mysterious reason was identified in the headline as a vampire thriller. It was around that time that I became fiercely inspired by Manny Farber’s Negative Space, still my own personal Bible, and by the founding members of Slant Magazine, who were roughly my age and offering review after passionate review. I was honored to start writing for them in 2005, my official entry into film journalism. And since then I’ve been lucky to have appeared in publications like Film Comment, Mubi, Reverse Shot, Fandor, and Movie Mezzanine, as well as my own archaic blog Cinepassion.org.

I always look forward to major festivals because it means the chance to read Croce's correspondences with fellow Mubi notebook contributor Daniel Kasman. He and Kasman have very different styles and reading their letters, their voices more like two-part harmonies than counterpoints, is endlessly rewarding. Their rapport goes down as easy as Canadian Club whiskey, and I've read many 'letter' based critical analyses that borrow heavily from their conversations. Elsewhere on the site, he, Calum Marsh and Joseph Jon Lanthier offer up Three Takes, where each spills a little ink on the same film. They're done all too infrequently (none have appeared since April 2013), but with each new installment, the three critics' voices are highlighted with ideal efficiency and perspicuousness. Croce's writing often reads like pointillism, tiny impressions of technique, theme or action that reveal the heart of the film and his personal relationship to cinema. Reading Croce, you'll get as much of the plot as you need to understand and a lustrous rendering of what makes it tick. This line from a review of Martin Scorsese's Hugo sees him firing on all cylinders: "The look on the bookish Isabelle’s face as she watches her first movie (Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!) crystallizes what Scorsese is after: The feeling of a virginal gaze being ravished by the harmonizing of the antique and the ultramodern." Splendid. However, he never lets his sense of beauty, his love of Borges, ever get in the way of his communion with any potential audience. His excellent shortform criticism allows little room for uncertainty and he never leaves the reader unsatisfied. 

On Dormant Beauty 
There are wayward daughters, suicidal addicts, hurried doctors, and close-ups of gorgeous women with their heads resting on giant pillows, at times blanched with suffering and at others posed like porcelain dolls. A very musical work (notice the aural swoops and drops of Bellocchio’s mise-en-scène), and a deeply humane one.

On Cape Fear
If this is to be a genre piece, fine—let the genre be the horror film. The sense of unease is all-pervasive: Freddie Francis’ camera slithers and snaps, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing shocks and jabs, vivid color more than once switches to X-ray negative. De Niro’s Max Cady is a convicted rapist who emerges from prison a pumped-up Übermensch, ready to settle scores with Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), the lawyer who originally defended him. Covered with Armageddon tattoos, driving an inferno-red convertible while wielding a foot-long phallic cigar, he’s such an uproarious cartoon of malevolence that when original Max Cady Robert Mitchum pops up, he can’t help commenting on the character’s semiotics: “Jeez, I don’t know whether to look at him or read him.” 

On Alps
Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of Dogtooth, Alps finds Lanthimos building on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration. Working with cinematographer Christos Voudouris, he composes his images (with characters frequently decapitated by off-center framing or liquefied into out-of-focus background forms) to conjure up an atmosphere of dread that hangs over even the most deceptively tranquil scenes. By swathing every relationship in layers of hierarchical pretense and distortion, Lanthimos envisions social order itself as a continuous performance, an existential variation of Shakespeare's dictum about the human race as players on the world's stage. For him, the roles people assign each other can weigh as much as the stone masks of ancient Greek theater. In that sense, it's telling that the nurse's crack-up scene (where she desperately spouts the lines she had previously memorized while being forcibly dragged into the street) is immediately followed by the gymnast's flawless big number: the former is frantic improvisation while the latter is perfectly rehearsed choreography, and the subtly devastating closing image asks which is more oppressive.


On Under the Skin
Dear Danny, funny you mention Casanova and Dracula, because that could easily be one way to describe the legitimately uncanny Under the Skin. Another would be Species directed by the Antonioni of Red Desert. From the opening shots—a staring retina emerges from a wandering dark orb, the cosmic unto the visceral—there’s a sense of ineffable dread making the images vibrate. It’s an otherworldly film, but the locations are scraggly, overcast, wintry, a Scotland very much like that of Ken Loach. Against this naturalism lies the most extreme stylization, patches of abstract blackness literally swallowing up young men as they march towards the beckoning heroine, a body-harvesting creature that happens to look exactly like Scarlett Johansson. Just as a human body can be evacuated of everything but its skin (one of several remarkable visions), so is an alien skin gradually filled with… what? Horror? Longing? Compassion? The film’s sustained feeling of discovery derives greatly from the way new, maybe unnamed emotions seem to be churning inside Johansson’s curvaceous visitor as she cuts a swath through Glasgow, whether she’s trying to keep a slice of chocolate cake down or finally contemplating her own tear-away visage. Danny, this is as strange as anything in the Wavelengths program. Who the hell is Jonathan Glazer? Commercials, a gangster thriller in Sexy Beast, a surreal drama in Birth, then poof! And now, almost a decade later, this. As a portrait of consumption in inner and outer spaces, Under the Skin is simultaneously direct in its metaphoric implications and as crazily prismatic as Holy Motors. It can be as trying as it is striking, but I don’t plan on forgetting it any time soon.