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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MILANA VUJKOV
Writer, artist, independent film scholar, researching the psychology of art and creativity, cinema and spectatorship, film as therapy, narrative immersion, the female gaze, archetypal enchantment, mythopoesis and mass media, consciousness and culture. Interested in the oracular nature of narration, I fuse poetic art and alchemical storytelling, creating in various media — incorporating elements of fairytales, psychogeography, transrealism, divinatory techniques, magical lore, experimental cinema, visual anthropology, art therapy. Graduated in Psychology (BA with Hons), University of Novi Sad. MA in History of Film & Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London. Worked in UK media/entertainment industry. Author at Poets, Mavericks & Prophets and Lola On Film. Host of Lola & The Poets, a storytelling podcast exploring diverse ways the mystical and the mundane intertwine. Literary translator. Running my own art business. Tomatometer-Approved Critic. Serbia-UK. To get in touch, please e-mail me at milana@lolaonfilm.com
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A film thematically sawed in half, as if penned by two entirely different minds, styles, and social politics, glued in the middle by Knightley’s determined performance, which, through sheer grit and star power, carries the Promethean fire of a promising Hitchcockian thriller (with mistaken identities & much to say on the filthy rich), to a convoluted soap opera conclusion.
★★☆☆☆
READ MOREGrimonprez’s maverick doc is a complex wild ride tracking the 1961 CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first PM of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an inspired piecing-together of a painful historical trajectory through cleverly devised bebop shortcuts, using editing and source material as jazz improv, stunning its viewer with its bulls-eye accuracy.
★★★★★
READ MOREMacabre and glamorous, perfectly shot, yet lacking in the original’s black humour, resorting to self-irony, instead, this fascinating story of death and desire slowly succumbs to becoming the very disease it depicts, mesmerised by its own beautiful, soulless emptiness, fully open to the seductive corruption it so masterfully and pedantically conveys.
★★★☆☆
READ MOREElectrifying (pun intended), despite a few glitches in its finely threaded matrix, mostly in places where it tries too hard to be Dylanesque. Timothée Chalamet inhabits the legendary musician with elegance and ease, allowing for his own interpretation to be led by an intuitive understanding of the man, rather than mimicry or idolatry.
★★★★☆
READ MOREAn adaptation of a Nicholas Hogg novel, darkly atmospheric, it kicks off verging on decent and thought-provoking, but quickly slips into a rushed set of simplified conclusions which undermine the backbone of a solid story tackling important themes — the danger of groupthink, eco-doomsday cults, and the siren spell of internet gurus.
★★☆☆☆
READ MOREAn honest piece of filmmaking, in which Eastwood turns a beady eye on the inner workings of the US judicial system. It is a pity that in steadily manning this ship, the director stops short each time the actors arrive at a point of inner truth, pulling them back into the broader picture, pushing for the examination of an entire society.
★★★☆☆
READ MOREA failed musical courtroom melodrama, whose bloated agenda betrayed Joaquin Phoenix’s singular creation, a living entity of its own haunting the popular mythos — while fragments of this difficult, compelling tale lie strewn on the floor, as if in a bloody Gotham City crime scene, waiting for a forensic examination of its disemboweled narrative.
★☆☆☆☆
READ MOREPlaying out like a breathless thriller, its dry humour colouring its elegant script, with zany indie logic applied to an epic tale, and the contemporary spirit of actors refashioning (yet respecting) its ur-traditional setting, this is a fascinating and controversial watch, emphasising the uncertainty of faith over the finality of dogma.
★★★★★
READ MOREA dented but delightful genre upgrade, steers the archetypal tale of undead bloodsuckers into comfortable Addams Family territory — then radicalises it with a daring Nietzschean twist. Beautifully shot, wrapped in nighttime neon, it’s a slightly misaligned tale, to be sure — yet also a clever, charming one.
★★★☆☆
READ MOREFreud and C.S. Lewis converse, at length, about the meaning of god in a godless world, in this elegant meditation on mortality — while WW2, and the end of the world, begin. Smooth and enjoyable as a gorgeous piece of chamber music, its stage roots and intellectualism visible and unapologetic, giving it core strength, and its only (minor) flaw.
★★★★☆
READ MORELukewarm doc nevertheless sees award-winning journalist Ronan Farrow hot on the trail of Pegasus, a commercial spyware developed by the Israeli NSO Group, devised for government use against criminals and terrorists, yet also utilised to target activists, politicians, journalists, their families, or any ordinary citizen that ‘falls out of line’.
★★☆☆☆
READ MOREWriter/director Timm Kröger‘s brilliantly devised thriller is a feverish metaphysical noir, opaque, dreamlike, shot in exquisite monochrome, yet it fails in its pedestrian third act, leading us to a place where all its strange strands meet, and instead of ending in apt enigma — delivers an essay. Nevertheless, it still lingers in the mind, days after watching.
★★★☆☆
READ MOREThe acrobatics of the mise-en-scène are as diabolically fascinating as ever in the red dust of the post-Australian Wasteland. Yet, as dedicated as Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth are in it, their delivery cannot compare with the depth of the Hardy/Theron combo. Still, I could not take my eyes off the screen. A power-ride with only one destination.
★★★☆☆
READ MOREIt seems strange and somehow entirely expected that not many people nowadays would have heard of Pallenberg, the spiritus movens of The Rolling Stones, the style icon, the counterculture queen. This doc aims to disrupt that state of affairs. Fascinating and classy, both tough-as-nails and tender — an exhilarating watch.
★★★★☆
READ MOREThere was a void, endless and dark, in the comfort of Priscilla’s existence. As well as love, disturbingly abusive yet enduring. And Sofia Coppola nailed all that queasy glamour and somnambulic psychosexual malaise to a tee. Spaeny is alike a silent-era screen siren, conveying an incredible range of emotions, without words.
★★★★☆
READ MOREOne crucial aspect of Amy Winehouse’s life Taylor-Johnson presented well is to make the central drama of her final years clearer to the audiences by elevating her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil to the position it actually had in her life. That, and Marisa Abela’s fierce performance, makes this heavily flawed biopic worthy of praise.
★★★☆☆
READ MOREPoetic, mischievous, with magically potent inner logic, this story of a young British archeologist turned grave robber in 1980s Italy is a chimera in its own right, half fairytale, half heist, a hybrid consisting of parts that usually would not fit, but seem to exist together on screen, seamlessly, in a way only poetry is able to convey.
★★★★★
READ MOREA triumph of style over substance, its sophisticated visuals barely managing to prop up a dialogue that seems to have been written on cocktail napkins. The sadomasochistic glee of the House Harkonnen appearing as an exercise in kinky fashion, their B/W world amplifying the feel of a Vogue spread dedicated to alternative lifestyles.
★☆☆☆☆
READ MOREA prolonged fashion mag photoshoot, with a perfunctory script included — until its very end, when it decides to become an actual biopic of Lenny Bernstein, the celebrated American conductor and composer, yet far too late to make amends for the glossy tedium of the entire proceedings. A cocktail mix of the brilliant and the banal.
★★☆☆☆
READ MOREThe 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, then 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 much fanfare, draws us into its narrative space, effortlessly.
★★★★☆
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The Mapplethorpesque photography in Zaillian’s 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 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 stare 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, 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 MOREDid human desire for magic escape the scorn of rational thought via the vehicle of 20th century cinema? Through fascination with haunted universes, I explore narrative immersion, celluloid wizardry, the abandonment of the palpable for the ecstasy of the enchanted. Symposium paper. Goldsmiths, University of London.
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 in portals, where darkness and light meet, the heroines gazing back at us, in defiance, transforming into a new fluid form of 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, in eight golden minutes of television, reminded us of that, with pure anarchist glee.
READ MOREShort & sweet weekend ride through a cinematic landscape that is slowly moving from niche to broader in the Balkans, yet with quality that never drops a beat. Merlinka is a bold festival of good humour and defiance, with a sophisticated programme, a growing audience, and enough maverick charm to face both friend and foe.
READ MOREReflecting on the emotional paralysis I underwent publishing a film review, I examine the impact of personal, familial, and collective trauma on individual expression, the implications of self-censorship on writing, addressing deeper dilemmas of engagement in polarised public discourse in post-conflict societies. Published in Patterns of Miscommunication in Contemporary East-Central European Cinema (2024).
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 