Deconstructing the spectacle, measuring empty calories, offering nutritional insights on films newly released, as well as archival treasures, assessing the state of film culture, exploring new formats & illuminating cinema’s place in society, as well as in our individual psychology.
READ MOREOn how we are enchanted by film, juxtaposing early film theory, post-Jungian analysis, anthropology of ritual, and the moving image as transformative tool in art therapy, coining the term archetypal enchantment. It serves as basis to my subsequent theoretical approach to cinema.
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Writer, artist, and independent film scholar, with an educational background in psychology and film history, researching the psychology of art and creativity, cinema and spectatorship, the female gaze, archetypal enchantment, consciousness and culture. Interested in the oracular nature of narration, I fuse poetic art and alchemical storytelling, creating in various types of media — incorporating elements of fairytales, psychogeography, transrealism, divinatory techniques, experimental cinema, visual anthropology, art therapy. Graduated in Psychology (BA with Hons), Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad. MA in History of Film & Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London. Author at Poets, Mavericks & Prophets and Lola On Film blogs. Host of Lola & The Poets, a storytelling podcast on the magical real. Running my own art Story Shop. Literary translator. Tomatometer-Approved Critic. Serbia-UK. To get in touch, please e-mail me at milana@lolaonfilm.com
The juxtaposition of the pert and the painful is rarely pulled off without a sacrificing the heart of the story — which in the case of the BBC Newsnight’s interview with Prince Andrew are the underage girls sex-trafficked by Epstein. Yet, it shows a society tainted by injustice, stratified by status, and then, inexplicably, makes pleasures of social mobility its point. ★★✩✩✩
READ MOREJustine Triet’s subversive Palme d’Or-winning psychological courtroom thriller is a proper postmodern 21st century mystery, ambivalent to its very core, leaving ample space for lingering suspicions and complex afterthoughts. It is also an all-around accomplished cinema, that, without too much fanfare, draws us into its narrative space, effortlessly. ★★★★✩
READ MOREIt is a significant risk to dedicate a decade of one’s life on a conceptual film on the diabolical mechanics of the Holocaust, presented in a rigorously detached filmic frame, almost postcard-like — and allow that point to sink into the cortex of the viewer, via the agency of sound, denying any visual pleasure in the highly aestheticised proceedings. ★★★★★
READ MOREAn earnest biopic on a fascinating character, played with great complexity by Annette Bening, a force of nature, in her own right, employed in this story to full artistic capacity. It has an almost documentary feel to it, which, in a narrative film, could be a double-edged sword. Here, by being hindered in places by its own meticulousness in technique. ★★★✩✩
READ MOREWhoever lived in the chauvinist squalor that was the 1990s in the Balkans, a time when avenging ghosts and delusional violent men ravaged these lands, knows the truth when they see it. There may be many paths to it, as they are to the allegorical Rome in the title. But there is only one destination. A powerful, shattering account of the Srebrenica massacre. ★★★★★
READ MOREReviewing fine indie shorts in our Lola Loves Shorts series: Writer-director Ana Pio delivers a raw, visceral, unflinching cinematic account of severe trauma in the aftermath of a sexual assault, meticulously constructing the isolated, distorted, fishbowl world of a young woman re-living it. It’s a difficult watch, yet a brilliantly assembled piece of filmmaking — precise, compassionate, and essential.
READ MOREIf you ever had any interest in psychopathology outside the spectacle of media glamorisation and extensive exploitation, this is the doc you’ve been looking for. Devastating and fascinating, it suffers perhaps from visual and narrative fragmentation, but what it does do, decisively, is depict human thirst for retribution. Of society as executioner. ★★★★✩
READ MOREWho was it that said history was just one damn thing after another? This is what Scott’s epic feels like when not focused on the electrifying performance of Phoenix, as the diminutive great man himself, and his passionate, playful, volatile relationship with lover and wife (and ex-wife), Josephine, beautifully portrayed by an entirely miscast Kirby. ★★★✩✩
READ MOREHelmed by an otherwise highly inventive director, with its game cast left meandering in a film that should have been, at least, fun to watch — it is less than the sum of its parts, lacking a developed script and coherent directorial vision, dragging on to its inevitable demise — drowned in a patchwork of trivia. Dalíland is such a missed opportunity. ★✩✩✩✩
READ MORETracing the aftermath of a factual reactor incident at the Vinča Nuclear Institute, in 1958, Bjelogrlić treads the perilous tightrope between genre-generated sentiment and genuine emotion, arriving at an incredibly humane, candid story on the moralities of scientific experiment. A truly moving meditation on what courage, at its core, really is. ★★★★✩
READ MOREExasperating, until it becomes heartbreaking — a cryptic Gothic tale with a twist that one can sense coming from the first minutes the film rolls. It’s the road that it takes to its inevitable conclusion that is the mystery. High-craft filmmaking, but lacking in openness of structure, allowing too little oxygen for audiences to inhale until its final act. ★★★✩✩
READ MOREA sweeping mea culpa of the (Wild) West, and conspicuously lacking in any of the usual Hollywood glamourisations of the greed that built an Empire, Scorsese’s truly honourable and praiseworthy adaptation of Grann’s bestseller is also a study in why films should never be too respectful of any topic beyond the duty to their own art form. ★★★✩✩
READ MOREBased on Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, and stunningly cinematically accomplished that it is, this whirlwind spectacle comes out short in the one thing that matters most in a mystery – the story itself. Its psychological elements seem to be suffocated by their own locality, unable to gain any independence from the phantasmagorical scenery of Venice. ★★✩✩✩
READ MOREThis B&W retro sci-fi “found-footage” time-travel yarn is a stylish and perfectly formed cinematic coup — a genius archival mix of film stock in a witty Gen Z fantasy of saving-the-world, while elegantly sipping wine in chichi period clothes, in a fashionably derelict mansion, talking postmodern platitudes, until the darkness seeps in. ★★★★✩
READ MOREDenis’s latest is not the tour de force her breakthrough film was, yet it is made of the same elusive material, inhabiting a volatile liminal space, oozing sensual honesty, introducing a third entity conjured through relating, an interpersonal presence which the filmmaker captures through her lens as few others can, with such poetic precision and humanity. ★★★★✩
READ MOREIts emphasis on impeccable style and photogenic chit-chat was certainly counter-productive to my previous sympathies, as I began to wonder if this Navalny was the same person who courageously, almost single-handedly, took on the Russian security state. A missed opportunity for creating compelling testimony about an authentically dire situation. ★✩✩✩✩
READ MOREA profound and discombobulating meditation on the twin entities constituting the cult of fame — the star and its mirror image, the public, examining the corrosive power dynamic underlying the exchange of one’s identity for mass attention, as well as the hot topic of separating art from the artist. An ancient schism currently manifesting as cancel culture. ★★★★★
READ MOREAll the weight of the story (metaphorically and literally) is carried by its tragic protagonist — the ailing Charlie, whom Brendan Fraser portrays with such depth, nuance, and wit. Nothing in the film’s text matches this commitment, and that’s a problem. The needlessly prolonged gaze upon Charlie’s physicality further killing the point aimed to be conveyed. ★★★✩✩
READ MORELike being on a theme park ride you thought would be fantastic fun, then nausea and disorientation kick in, colours blur. EEAAO holds within it a great idea, when one disentangles it from the hairball that is its narrative. In all its originality, it telegraphs its message, instead of allowing this intricately constructed ingenious world to be the message. ★★✩✩✩
READ MORECaptures the fragile state of being a human in one grand swoop of wit and weltschmerz — the film’s contours elegantly morose, its humour dark and bitter-sweet, its inhabitants erratic and gloriously eloquent, its landscape a mystery onto itself. The eponymous banshee, right on the money, carrying the mythical into the realms of the mundane. ★★★★★
READ MOREThe point where all good intentions in a storyline turn to dust is when the narrative stops respecting its characters, however vile they are. In Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winner, satire turns to caricature pretty quickly, offering an array of humans so painfully vapid, that I started to root for these horrible people to be given at least an ounce of screen dignity. ★★✩✩✩
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The Mapplethorpesque photography in Zaillian’s screen adaptation of Highsmith’s novel is a character in its own right, as Ripley is more a ‘setting’ than a ‘personality’, rather his setting becomes his personality — a social media influencer’s dream. He might be a human lacking a character or forever building a character, but there is a balance of extreme points in Andrew Scott’s Ripley, an alchemy of the darkest variety.
READ MOREThe only way to look at Chernobyl is through the complex ocular shield of the camera, otherwise we’d be staring at Medusa’s face, unprotected. An open nuclear reactor core burning our synapses through sheer magnitude of existential incomprehension. This is a piece of popular art offering the bleakest narrative possible, yet the audience rushed to it, like it was liquid oxygen — an apocalyptic serialised memento mori.
READ MOREMalkovich is a Poirot that lives in perpetual mourning, in a history hiding underneath its own frayed repeats. It’s 1933 Britain. Fascism as collective narcissism. Narcissism as ultimate isolation from life source. John Malkovich as Poirot, a stranger in a strange land, owning a detective’s cellular memory. This is esoteric Christie, avenging angel, her agent, Sarah Phelps at the steering wheel.
READ MORESomething in the nature of a recording defies rational explanation. A replica of life, its twin and its double, also its deathly echo, preserving life by embalming it for eternity, or at least until the shelf life of the medium itself expires. Images have the numinosity to affect us deeply – a capacity to heal and destroy.
READ MOREExploring the myth of the fallen woman in classic Hollywood melodrama, its historical, religious and literary antecedents, archetypal realms of the dark, wild feminine projected onto the screen, her impact on the spectator. A dispossessed femininity, fragmented and demonised, yet powerfully vibrant and creative.
READ MOREEncountering feminine mysteries on celluloid, a post-Jungian analysis of the veneration of the Hollywood film icon, tracing the blazing trail of cinema femme fatales, their imagery framed within portals, places where darkness and light meet, the heroines gazing back at us, in defiance, transforming into a new fluid form of the femme fatale as action figure.
READ MOREThe 96th Academy Awards was not a corker, by any measure, more of a sprawling end-of-empire endeavour, with bad comedy writing, tired quips and tropes, and a bit of fresh individual pizzazz — a show which would have veered towards certain oblivion, if it not for the severe incongruity of the fantasy of the Oscars with the actual world beyond its gilded gates.
READ MOREThe human need for a pedestal exists to look up at something that is, ultimately, to be achieved. The social contract breaks when the chosen begin to look down at the rabble. In his roast to end all roasts, the host of the 2020 Globes, Ricky Gervais, made for eight golden minutes of television, reminding us of just that, with pure anarchist glee.
READ MOREShort & sweet weekend ride through a cinematic landscape that is very slowly moving from niche to broader in the Balkans, yet with quality that never drops a beat. Merlinka is a bold, bright festival of good humour and defiance, with a sophisticated programme, a growing audience, and enough maverick charm to face both friend and foe.
READ MOREDid human desire for magic escape the scorn of rational thought via the vehicle of 20th century cinema? Through our fascination with haunted universes, the paper explores narrative immersion, celluloid wizardry, and the abandonment of the palpable for the ecstasy of the enchanted. SYMPOSIUM. 21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture. 30 Jun 2023. Goldsmiths, University of London.
READ MORENo Exit presents the state of Serbian society throughout the decade of the 1990s and serves as metaphor for a nation’s inner battle. The season was devised as homage to ordinary people fighting valiantly to preserve the last shreds of decency in a society over-powered by fear. No Exit: Essential Serbian Cinema, 1995-2000. Curated by Milana Vujkov. 4-16 November 2005. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
READ MOREAUTHOR ©MILANA VUJKOV
Lola On Film 