Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

Star Wars Episode VII: Feminism from “Far, Far Away” »

By Sotiris Petridis. Introduction The Star Wars saga is an internal and important part of popular culture since its first filmic text back in 1977. Apart from the…

Cannibalized Chaos: Iago, The Joker and the “Good Sport” of Postmodernism »

By Richmond B. Adams. During a conversation approximately one-third of the way through The Dark Knight (2008), Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) expresses to Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) his…

The Sentinel Excavated »

By Christopher Sharrett. I use the word “excavated” in my title not because the 1977 horror film The Sentinel , directed by Michael Winner, is lost to film…

The Best and the Most Overrated of 2015 »

By Film International. The editors’ Top 10 and Overrated 10 include films that were released in the editors’ respective regions during 2015. They have been selected by Daniel…

CGI and the Audience: Things Better Left Unsaid »

By Fred Wagner. The Show of Shows (2015), a recently released documentary made out of archive footage shows the lost world of the circus – a cornucopia of…

The Battle for Fair Remuneration: A Slovenian Drama with International Consequences »

By Edgar Tijhuis. Sometimes it seems like time stood still in Slovenia. In 2009 Variety magazine reported about a “royalty battle” in central and eastern Europe. Television producers…

“All My Treasures”: On Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words (2015) »

By Tony Williams. Critic-director Stig Bjorkman, well known for his studies on directors such as Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, has made an intriguing documentary on this well-known…

I, Shakespeare by Anonymous and Last Will. & Testament »

By David Ryan. Rewriting history is a common academic enterprise, and crafting Elizabethan history – particularly Shakespearean biography – is composed recursively. Though Anonymous (2011) is neither a serious…

(((1973)))
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Kurt Vonnegut Hunter Thompson Norman Mailer Tom Wolfe William Burroughs Jonathan Miller William Burroughs Jr Jacob Bronowski Robert Hughes Bob Woodward Carl Bernstein Peter Maas Germaine Greer Ray…

Traces of Postindian Survivance: Two Short Films by Jeff Barnaby »

By John Garland Winn. Jeff Barnaby, a Mi’kmaq First Nations director, was four years old when the Quebec Provincial Police raided his Restigouche Reservation to restrict salmon fishing…

Rereading The Wire: police procedural, social games and the magic of blood »

By Rajko Radović. Blood has been shed on the asphalt at night. We see it in close-up as thin red lines spreading in all directions into the darkness…

Festival Reports

The 2016 DC Independent Film Festival »

By Gary M. Kramer The DC Independent Film Festival, billed as “the oldest independent film festival in our nation’s capital,” started screening dozens of features, documentaries, shorts and animated films March 4-13. Here…

By Cleaver Patterson. Modern films can be hard to categorise: with so many increasingly open to different interpretations it is often hard to single out one core theme or trait. Fortunately though, this…

By Erica Johnson Debeljak. The 26th Ljubljanski mednarodni filmski festival (LIFFE) took place from November 11 to November 22 last year. It is the fifteenth incarnation of this festival under the catchy acronym…

By Yun-hua Chen. DOKU.ARTS, after its seven-year residence in Amsterdam and Brazil, returned to Berlin and has stayed here since 2012. The event focuses on documentaries exploring art and artists, some of which,…

By Gary M. Kramer. The American Film Institute’s annual European Union Film Showcase screened December 1-20 at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. This year’s program, the festival’s 28th, opened with Spanish…

By Gary M. Kramer. The 53rd New York Film Festival runs through October 11 and there are several outstanding features by established and returning filmmakers playing at the fest. Here is a rundown…

By Gary M. Kramer. The New York Film Festival is a terrific showcase for shorts, and this year, there are four short film programs with international, genre, animation, and New York themes that…

Interview

“A Strange, Organized Mixture”: David Farr on The Ones Below »

By Paul Risker. David Farr’s directorial feature debut The Ones Below (2016) reflects ambition stemming from the storyteller’s youth, before his career…

By Mark James. Argentinean director Marco Berger first gained notoriety for his 2009 Berlin Film Festival hit, Plan B—a…

By Paul Risker. Neither is the final version of a film nor the path of the filmmaker a collection of…

By Gary M. Kramer Edge of Seventeen is writer Todd Stephens’ seminal and semi-autobiographical 1988 coming out film. Directed…

By Tom Ue. Emily Ting graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was previously mostly known for…

By Paul Risker. “I feel like it was a risk and I feel proud that I pulled it off,” says…

By Paul Risker. Partisan (2015) is the directorial feature debut of Australian filmmaker Ariel Kleiman, who already has a humorous…

By Amir Ganjavie. Radu Muntean’ s new, critically acclaimed Romanian film One Floor Below recently won a Special Citation by the National…

By Tom Ue. Adam Stephen Kelly is the author of over 700 articles, interviews, features and reviews, and he has…

By Tom Ue. Trevor Anderson was born in Red Deer, Alberta, and is now based in Edmonton. His short…

richmond adams: Thank you, Dr. Williams, as always.
Tony Williams: Congratulations, Richmond. This is a very stimulating article full of in depth scholarship. We need...
Tony Williams: Paul, I’m fully in agreement. Last Tuesday, I attempted to show links between THE LADIES MAN...
Paul Risker: Thanks Chris and Tony for your comments. It was a pleasure to revisit this film that upon my first...
Elias Savada: The correct website for info on the DCIFF screening is http://dciff-indie.org/2016-fe atures/fools/

Review

Zootopia: A Modern Interpretation of a Fairy Tale »

By Cleaver Patterson. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a young bunny with big ideas. Living in the rural town of Bunnyburrow her parents expect her to follow in the family…

Fearless Realism: Krisha »

By Elias Savada. Other than a kitchen catastrophe, there’s not a sloppy moment in Trey Edward Shults’ micro-budgeted, crowdsourced Krisha, an incredibly well-constructed debut feature that plays like a home movie…

Old Men Rule in Remember »

By Elias Savada. The perception that people of significantly older age can’t control their destinies, particularly if dementia is knocking at their door, is expressively examined in Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s…

A Cruel Destiny: Intruders »

By Paul Risker. I still recall the scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) when the father tells his offspring that they cannot live separately of the world. It is…

Berlin Replayed: Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era by Brigitta B. Wagner »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This book falls into the now familiar category of Cityscape Studies but focuses on representations of Berlin from the period of Walter Ruttmann’s well-known…

Life Falls Apart: Sibylle »

By Elias Savada. The ominous hum of unease that saturates Swiss-born director Michael Krummenacher’s effective yet derivative German thriller Sibylle – being sold worldwide under the title Like a Cast Shadow –…

Breaking Waves with Neptune »

By Elias Savada. Spiritual and haunting in its low decibel manner, the New England coming-of-age drama Neptune is an indie effort that follows a young teenager’s soul-searching excursion along a disconcerting…

Fools Stalk at First Sight »

By Elias Savada. A semi-creepy opening sequence for director-writer Benjamin Meyer’s micro-budget feature directorial debut Fools had me wondering whether stalking can be an acceptable dating platform. Two people exchange glances…

Secrets Haunt Our Past: The Automatic Hate »

By Elias Savada. Listen, I have three vices. Movies. Craft beer. And genealogy. Shortly after Justin Lerner’s second feature, The Automatic Hate, begins, there’s an uncomfortable meeting between socially awkward Alexis…

The Camera as Our Imagination: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) »

By Paul Risker. Alain Resnais and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) – two names forever locked in an embrace; the latter a defining and resounding heartbeat within the filmmaker’s cinema. Alongside Last…

Conventional Calamity: The Wave »

By Elias Savada. Disaster movies are a dime a dozen here in the United States. Catastrophes (usually) are Hollywood’s bread-and-butter…and your buttered popcorn. Now, head across the pond to Norway and…

Small Town Texas Lite: A Country Called Home »

By Elias Savada. Doused with a familiar, filial melancholy, A Country Called Home is a bittersweet tale of a 25-year-old woman coming to grips with the ghosts in her estranged family’s…

Fleeting Reconciliation: Colliding Dreams »

By Elias Savada. The nightmare that surrounds the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East has never been an easy one to suppress. It’s been one step forward, two steps back for…

The Deceptively Simple Magic of Only Yesterday (1991) »

by John Duncan Talbird. At the midpoint of Isao Takahata’s animated Only Yesterday (1991) narrator-protagonist Taeko gives us a lesson on the making of rouge: on the picking of the…

Not Quite Dark Enough »

By Elias Savada. Dark is another day (and night) in the life of a West Virginny girl in the Big City. It begins with a lesbian couple au naturel yet,…

Denmark vs. Afghanistan: The Moral Dilemma of A War »

By Elias Savada. In a world forever at war, Denmark doesn’t float to the top of the list as a country promoting military involvement in remote venues. Interventions have been few…

Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by Patrick McGilligan »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. I must admit that I approached this book with hesitation. Although the author has edited excellent interviews with blacklist victims and screenwriters from Hollywood’s…

Reframing Realism in My Beautiful Laundrette »

By William Repass. “You’re dirty. You’re beautiful.” “What is it that the gora Englishman always needs? Clean clothes!” In the world of Stephen Frears’ and Hanif Kureishi’s 1985 cult classic,…

The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray’s Masterpiece »

By Christopher Sharrett. I usually begin a review of a piece of neglected film history with a tirade about the state of film culture, as the New Hollywood rides roughshod…

By Cleaver Patterson. In 8th century, Tang Dynasty China, Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu) has lived for many years, isolated from her family…

By Elias Savada. Mexico’s grand auteur Arturo Ripstein is in fine neorealistic form with his devilishly depressing feature Bleak Street (La calle de…

By Brandon Konecny. As we gear up for Academy Awards, it’s important to note the countries not taking part in this all-too-American…

By Elias Savada. The other day North Korea exploded what it called a hydrogen bomb, when, in reality (we’re told), it wasn’t all…

By Christopher Sharrett. William S. Burroughs is often regarded as the King of the Beats, the central figure of the Beat Generation…

By Elias Savada. The emotional stability of five delightfully effervescent sisters is mightily tested in Mustang, a biting and anguishing indictment of conservative…

By Giuseppe Sedia. In a certain way, Shûji Terayama never reached a point in his career when he felt the need to…

By Sotiris Petridis. Filmmaker Mark Hartley’s (2008’s Not Quite Hollywood, 2010’s Machete Maidens Unleashed!) latest delightful chronicle of B-movie splendor, Electric Boogaloo: The…

By Elias Savada. “Anything can be turned into anything.” So says scruffy, droopy-eyed musician/music producer Nick Koenig, the eponymous subject of writer-producer-director Adam…

By Elias Savada. Mention the words “subprime mortgage” and people start dozing, or leave the room. Hey, you! Yes, you! Wake up. And…

By Paul Risker. Stories as in life have no true beginning, middle or end. Rather they are just a series of events…

By Jude Warne. “What is the good of all this progress? By overcoming distance we overcome difference.” True – it seems likely that…

By Elias Savada. I was ready to give up on Spike Lee after suffering through Red Hook Summer, his 2012 scattershot meditation on…

By Elias Savada. It’s interesting that novelist-screenwriter-producer Nick Hornby and director John Crowley previously have been best known in the world of…

By Robert K. Lightning. The historic 1962 interview of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (ironically tape recorded and photographed, but apparently unfilmed)…

By Jude Warne. “Her voice is full of money,” Jay Gatsby says of his love Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Those fortunate enough to have met or interviewed Larry Cohen are always amazed by his detailed…

By Christopher Sharrett. Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, adapted from a recent novel by Emma Donoghue, is a “true crime” thriller of important resonance. …

By Jude Warne. Jon Whelan acted solely as a concerned parent when he chose to investigate why his daughter’s new pajamas, which…

By Elias Savada. Producer-director-editor Jeffrey Schwarz – I Am Divine (2013), Vito (2011), Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story (2007) – is back in original…

By Matthew Sorrento. Dalton Trumbo’s story is an ideal one to represent the golden age of Hollywood. A famed screenwriter with literary roots (as…

By Sotiris Petridis. The horror film usually incorporates social critiques within its filmic texts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) has been described as…

By Jude Warne. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966), recently released as a joint Blu-ray set via The Criterion…

By Elias Savada. It’s not just that the always quirky Crispin Glover is featured in Aimy in a Cage that makes it…

By Elias Savada. I’m not sure NASCAR saw this coming. I sure didn’t. Speed Sisters, which has been racing about the documentary film…

By Elias Savada. The smog hangs lightly over the partly cloudy skies of Mexico City as this story begins. A guitar with…

By Elias Savada. Australian director-writer Matthew Bate (responsible for the fly-on-the-wall 2011 documentary Shut Up Little Man: An Audio Misadventure) took an…

By Kyle Huffman. “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out of the frame.” This seemingly direct estimation…

By Elias Savada. I suspect the issues I have with the new Drew Barrymore-Toni Collette BFF “dramedy” Miss You Already (including a 112-minute,…

By Elias Savada. An escalating madness is the center of the disturbing world of Luciferous, a slow boil screamer presented at this…

By Devapriya Sanyal. To me Masaan (2015) didn’t give the feeling of eternal life flowing by, in its depiction its multifarious stories,…

By Paul Risker. From the hustle and bustle of Paris, the stage for Spiral (Engrenages, (2005-)) and Braquo (2009-2014), the new French…

A book review by Tony Williams. Though mostly well known to western audiences for playing the title characters in The Student of…

By Elias Savada. There’s a glossy bio-tech veneer bubbling up in Jose Nester Marquez’s new feature, Reversion. Despite its high concept sci-fi storyline…

By Axel Andersson. The middle-aged philosophy professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) pulls up to a liberal arts college in Newport in an…

By Cleaver Patterson. As the autumn nights draw in and winter fast approaches, the season seems more disposed to cinematic tales which…

By Kyle Huffman. In the first scene of Straight Outta Compton (2015), Easy E (Jason Mitchell) barely escapes a drug den being raided…

By James Slaymaker. Alex Ross Perry’s latest feature, Queen of Earth, explores similar thematic territory to his first three (Impolex, The Color Wheel and Listen Up…

By Jude Warne. “I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but because I’m getting away from things…

By Kyle Huffman. Every action movie relies on the audience’s suspension of disbelief regarding the humanity and dexterity of its star. Some,…

By Jeremy Carr. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Eddie Coyle sure could use a friend. Surrounded by many, known by…

By Elias Savada. There’s a tendency toward sexual subversion and sly mystery in any François Ozon film. Naughty fun in the comic…

By John Duncan Talbird. New Zealand has given the world actors Sam Neil and Russell Crowe and directors Jane Campion and Peter…

By William Repass. In today’s economic and political climate, it can be tempting to dismiss film as merely spectacle: a flimsy replacement…

By Elias Savada. I like looking at mountains. From a safe distance. Or on my computer screen saver. Occasionally, from above, in…

The Way, Way Back: An Appreciation »

By Christopher Sharrett. Some months ago I saw The Way, Way Back (2013) and was taken by it enough to buy the…

By James Knight. This August will see the US theatrical release of She’s Funny That Way, the latest feature from Peter Bogdanovich.…

By Tom Silva. Film is a living thing and so it faces an unending series of deaths. Like the mythic hero in…

By Robert K. Lightning. Lovers that demonstrate both spiritual affinity and spiritual equality have long been popular in middle-class entertainment. Repartee has…

By Geoffrey Fox. The credits roll over a black-and-white newsreel of missiles and men parading before an austere Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow…

By Tony Williams. The title of this article has a double meaning. It is primarily a reworking of that lavishly illustrated and…

By Benjamin Bergholtz. “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” (Adorno…

By Christopher Sharrett. Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is a work of such staggering importance that its…

By Daniel Garrett. Some old films have a special appeal. They might not be excellent or particularly beloved objects, and yet they…

By Francesco Pascuzzi. Already with the film’s title, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta, 2005) sets out to toy with the…

By Tony Williams. On initial release, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic (1972) disappointed many and has remained in critical limbo to the present…

By Laura Crossley. “You’ve enjoyed the film, so now what are you going to do about the message? Tolkien didn’t just write…

By Elizabeth Mizon and Lee Salter. Digital media technologies are full of paradoxes. On one hand they are said to open up…

By Daniel Garrett. In the film Philadelphia (1993), written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Jonathan Demme, the actor Tom Hanks is…

By Noah Charney. Branko Djuric, who goes by the nickname Djuro, is one the biggest film and television stars of the former…

By Trevor Mowchun. “Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as…

By Robert K. Lightning. “It follows that the critic should read without inappropriate bias. We cannot properly object to The Pilgrim’s Progress,…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. We live in the age of the visible invisible; everything is supposedly available to us online, but in…

By Sheana Ochoa. Anyone who has watched the scene in the trailer of The Theory of Everything when Stephen Hawking’s character pulls…

By Christopher Sharrett. Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is last season’s fascinating, much-discussed contribution to the horror film, a genre that…

By Martin Smith. Despite increased transparency and liberalisation at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in recent decades, Britain remains one…

By Rajko Radovic. “I’m gonna wait till the stars come out. And see them twinkle in your eyes. I’m gonna wait till…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Now that some time has elapsed between the Sony hack and the release of the film that apparently…

By Film International. Another film year has come to an end and it’s time to sum up. Here are the films that…

By Jeremy Carr. Aside from his general lack of recognition as one of film history’s great comedians, the most tragic part of…

By Mathijs Peters. Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which Samuel Beckett defined as “an intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has…

By Steve Presence. “Today we do not really have any ‘centralized’ hubs like Indymedia anymore. What we do have is a proliferation…

COLLECTED AND INTRODUCED BY AMIR GANJAVIE. Reza Mirkarimi’s Today (Emrooz, 2014) was selected to represent Iran at the 2015 Oscars despite being…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It’s Halloween once again, and as one might suspect, American cable networks are offering a cornucopia of horror…

By Asal Bagheri. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no.…

By Sara Saljoughi. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no.…

By Luis Antunes Rocha. “The image, in terms of sound, always has the basic nature of a question. Fundamental to the cinema…

By Carol Vernallis. Michael Bay poses a problem. He is the second-highest-grossing director, after Spielberg, so it’s not surprising that critics and…

By John Burns. It seems that a number of historians and critics of Mexican film would be happier if the films starring…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. What are we watching now at the movies, or on television or Netflix for that matter?[1] Serials –…

By Tony Williams. Like most of his films, Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) generated considerable critical debate usually emphasizing questions of historical accuracy…