Aryan Tauqeer Khawaja

20. International Film Researcher, Critic and Workshop Producer at UK-China Film Collab.

Predator

Originally published on Letterboxd on 06/08/22 Colonial exploitation spatialized as venereal collapse. Its images, especially the primal tapestries present throughout the third act, are entrancing enough on their own (and at times they even reminded of Brakhage), but what binds them together is the way the camera seems

Prey

Originally published on Letterboxd on 05/08/22 A little too slick and formally perfunctory for my liking, but this is very competently constructed for the most part. There's an all-too-rare tactility in the action here that imbues skirmishes with genuine weight and consequence, in spite of the

Morocco

Originally published on 02/08/22 on Letterboxd As fervent in its passion as it is withdrawn in its transience. Its purposeful denial of any sort of cathartic, histrionic release from the harsh winds of the desert seem to affirm the notion that its interiors are merely constructions of flightful

The Departed

Originally published on Letterboxd on 30/07/22 “Exactly. You're nobody. You signed the papers, remember?” Was struck by the perpetual stream of montage on display here this time- there aren't crescendos in tension or climactic revelations so much as there are procedural adjustments. The war

Thief

Originally published on Letterboxd on 25/07/22 Its significance as the birth of Mann as an unparalleled image-maker and maestro of montage is immediately apparent, but what stood out to me this time around is the extent to which the ghost of Thief looms over Mann's men.

War of the Worlds

Originally published on 19/07/22 on Letterboxd. Undeniably a reflex response to the implosion of supposedly hermetically-sealed American suburbia in the aftermath of 9/11, and in many ways this is a deeply, almost virulently, reactionary text- consider the framing of the US military as saviours taking down unnamed

Johnnie To’s missions: stories of a Hong Kong film master

Originally published on 14/07/22 for UK-China Film Collab. Note, however, that the published version is an abridged version of a longer manuscript, which is available to read in its entirety here. In 1997, John Woo’s third English-language American-produced feature premiered. Based on a spec script that had

Breaking News: the war for a voice

Originally published on 08/07/22 for UK-China Film Collab According to the seminal French philosopher and media theorist Jean Baudrillard, one of the defining characteristics of the postmodern world is media hypersaturation. The “ecstasy of communication” induced by this saturation of media makes it so that the postmodern subject-that

Crimes of the Future

Originally published on 22/06/22 on Letterboxd Perhaps the most contemporary (even when considering something as politically pointed as Cosmopolis) Cronenberg has ever been. For all its deliberating upon the symbiosis between technology and the commodified body moulded to become reliant on the former for survival, this is essentially

We Can’t Save The Victims: Hauntology in Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu

Originally published November 2023 on Sense of Cinema

Top Gun: Maverick

Originally published on 30/05/22 on Letterboxd It’s fine. I prefer the dreamy formlessness of Scott’s original and this is definitely plagued to a certain extent by the notion of Cruise-as-auteur conflicting with Kosinski’s authorial intent. The centring of the flight sequences as something to be

Irma Vep

Originally published on 29/05/22 on Letterboxd Torrents of conflicting fetishes and obsessions collide with each other to rip a hole in the fabric of cinema vérité. Disembodiment, which seems to be one of Assayas’ most consistent obsessions, manifests here in the form of sublimation within the image, separating

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Originally published on 17/05/2022 on Letterboxd The first 20 minutes were promising, and there are occasionally flashes of something meaningful with regards to generational trauma, but every time this approaches something resembling sincerity it undercuts it with such inane humour. This brand of sickeningly saccharine storytelling is particularly

Avatar

Originally published on 13/05/22 on Letterboxd In which Cameron takes the radical step of envisioning a world without the profit incentive. In the decade since I last saw this its fetishisation of indigenous peoples and debatable ableism has only become more glaring, and yet my admiration for this

Cosmopolis

Originally published on 30/04/22 on Letterboxd “Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The

The Northman

Originally published on 18/04/22 on Letterboxd Doesn’t quite overcome Eggers’ tendency to suffocate his subjects within the frame, but his clinical attention to symmetry and procedure functions much better within the specific context of ritualized masculinity and Norse mythology than against the backdrop of English folklore. Refreshing

Too Old to Die Young

Originally published on 07/04/22 on Letterboxd Not sure whether this is any less obtuse than when I first saw it, but this is still such a stunning rendering of cultural apocalypse, where even the most debased erotic impulses are heightened to biblical allegory. For all its notions of

The Great Gatsby

Originally published on 18/03/22 on Letterboxd Don’t know whether it says more about me or the film that I still find the Young and Beautiful segments so touching. This takes every hint of discomfort and pulp from the original text and intensifies them to their fullest extent-

The Dark Knight

Originally published on 04/03/22 on Letterboxd Easily one of the most overtly fascistic blockbusters to come out of Hollywood. Doesn’t help that its politics are putrid, lending support to the Patriot Act in all but the name in a thinly-veiled metaphor for “extremism”. Its nature as conservative

Metatextuality and ‘The Matrix Resurrections’

Originally published on 02/03/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society Journal A reflection. An image all too familiar from countless bouts of repetition, inscribed into the mind. The shadows, the sheen, the sounds-they’re all the same. Only something’s a little off: it’s inverted. This

Inception

Originally published on 28/01/22 on Letterboxd You’ve heard all this before but this really is a genuinely remarkable work on obsession that happens to be the creation of someone as obsessed with the mechanics of his world as the characters that occupy it. Far from empty spectacle,

Populism or Propaganda?: On The Battle at Lake Changjin

Originally published on 12/01/22 for UK-China Film Collab The historical epic has long been defined by what some would call an aversion to historical accuracy or perhaps more generously, an unwavering commitment to the sweeping drama at any cost. They exist in the unsteady realm between propaganda and

Heat

Originally published on 27/02/22 on Letterboxd When Neil and Eady are staring at the skyline from above, the city lights are but a nondescript mass of colours, suspended against a sky that is nothing more than a layer of artifice, something telegraphed so clearly in its isolating effect

Zeros and Ones

Originally published on 08/01/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society Journal as part of the Our Favourite Films from 2021 feature Abel Ferrara has never been one to shy away from abstraction, nor an examination of the current moment, and his latest experiment, Zeros and Ones, is

Spider-Man 3

Originally published on 20/12/21 on Letterboxd. By far my favourite out of the 3. It's a testament to Raimi's skill as a director that even after studio interference, none of the tacked-on additions feel like anything other than Raimi's vision- a truly