FEATURED
Lola says…
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 MORE
Film, the Alchemical Medium
On 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.
READ MOREMETAPHYSICS OF CINEMA FILMOLOGY FILM AS MEDIUM THEORY CINEMA AND SOCIETY CULTURE CELLULOID TREASURES ARCHIVES INDIE PICS LOLA LOVES SHORTS
Writer, artist, independent scholar, fusing poetic art and alchemical storytelling in her artistic expression. Independent film scholar, researching psychology of cinema and spectatorship, the female gaze, psychology of art and creativity, archetypal enchantment, consciousness and culture. BA Psychology/MA History of Film & Visual Media. Tomatometer-Approved Critic. Author at Poets, Mavericks & Prophets and Lola On Film, hosts Lola & The Poets Podcast on magical realities, runs an online Story Shop. Serbia-UK. To get in touch, please e-mail me at milana@lolaonfilm.com
Subscribe to Lola On Film
Latest Reviews
One Battle After Another
Despite the formidable cinematic value of its second act, OBAA ends up a tautological film about politics that evidently abhors politics, its cynical attitude towards revolutionary vigour excessively veering towards realpolitik for what is primarily meant to be a pro-immigration epic, set in the midst of Trump’s America, with its heart on the right side of the moral universe.
★★★☆☆
READ MORE
Sinners
Kinetic, thrilling, and visually ravishing, Ryan Coogler’s high-octane deep-South epic is a quintessential (horror) tale of art, damnation, and the long road to redemption, twisting and turning in a time-magic fashion around one night in October 1932, when the veil between worlds had thinned, impacting the segregated world of Jim Crow, irrevocably.
★★★★☆
READ MORE
Wuthering Heights
Emerald Fennell’s lavish, lustful and slightly ludicrous new take on the dark Brontë tale sees the director fall into aesthetic stupor, delivering an Instagram reel of the Gothic love tragedy, slow in character development, but strong on image and whimsy, with a miscast lead in Margot Robbie, and a standout performance by Alison Oliver, as the naive yet deviant Isabella.
★★☆☆☆
READ MORE
Cover-Up
To be the person to expose the My Lai massacre, CIA’s Operation CHAOS, and Abu Ghraib, one has to be made of specific moral material. In a way, both legendary journalist Seymour Hersh and director Laura Poitras represent the best of America, perfect avatars of its promise of liberty, becoming the harshest critics of all the ways this experiment failed.
★★★★★
READ MORE
Lola Loves Shorts: Sisters/Hermanas
Reviewing fine indie shorts in our Lola Loves Shorts series: In this pensive documentary collage on sisterhood, love and fate, director Maria Munro, through soothing narration, supported by elegant illustration softly blended with archival material, dives deep into her family lore, prompted by a lucid hunch amidst a global pandemic, and sets off to find her lost secret sister — only to meet her briefly and lose her again.
READ MORE
The Phoenician Scheme
A lively, labyrinthine fable of grand entrepreneurship and the fickleness of fortune, with perfectly formed aesthetics and jazz-beat editing, cerebrally satisfying in its mannered whimsy, while, at its centre, it warmly nestles a sweet story of fatherly love. Roller-coster ride of international espionage, one-upmanship, high-altitude flirting, and deadly sibling rivalry.
★★★★☆
READ MORE
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s underlying strong sentiment on the topic at hand sidelined the whodunit at its centre, rendering the tale increasingly shambolic, as the screws of the hyperbolic story of religious mania and church shenanigans in Trumpian America grew tighter. Yet, the franchise remains sugar-grade addictive.
★★★☆☆
READ MORE
The Woman In Cabin 10
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 MORE
The Unpublished Word (Manuscripts Don’t Burn) — On Censorship, Film Writing & Trauma
Reflecting 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 MORE
Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat
Grimonprez’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 MORE
Nosferatu
Macabre 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 MORE
A Complete Unknown
Electrifying (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 MORESomething went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
filmology
Chernobyl HBO: Seeing In The Dark
The 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…
The ABC Murders & Fascism Redux
Malkovich 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…
Art psychotherapy, psychology of cinema, psychology and alchemy, alchemical symbolism in art, female gaze, transpersonal psychology, post-jungian analysis, cinema therapy, spectatorship, visual anthropology, cinéma vérité, experimental cinema, film noir, psychogeography, shamanism, anthropology of magic.
FILM THEORY
Archetypal Enchantment And The Twin Of David Lynch
Something 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…
Fallen Women of Hollywood Melodrama: 1930s-1950s
Exploring 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.
FILM CULTURE
2001: A Space Odyssey on 70mm. An Interview With A Magician.
There is no one closer to the true enchantment of film than the film projectionist – a craft that is slowly disappearing, as celluloid itself, and should be cherished as cinema treasure. Film, in its essence, is its medium. And the projectionist, therefore, its magician in residence. So consider this an interview with a master.
AUTHOR ©MILANA VUJKOV
Lola On Film 