One of cinema’s great ironies is that, for all the talk of representation and making the hidden visible, much of its power comes from withholding instead. Certainly this is true of slow cinema, of that poetic tendency which, in his landmark 1972 treatise, Paul Schrader called “the transcendental style in film.” The eternally self-lacerating Taxi Driver scribe’s brilliant latest, First Reformed, deserves a chapter in the updated edition – and the boxy image of a despairing reverend, mixing whiskey and Pepto Bismal while researching suicide vests on a laptop in a parsonage, should go on the cover.
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