Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice: Against All Doctrine »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about Andrei Tarkovsky, about whom I’ve been hesitant for decades. A few remarks…

North Korea’s International Movie Co-Productions, 1985-2012 »

By Johannes Schönherr. Kim Jong Il, the son of North Korea’s founder and Great Leader Kim Il Sung, went early in his youth in the direction of eventually…

Defying Ideology (and the Academy) – Mr. Novak: An Acclaimed Television Series by Chuck Harter »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. When recovering from reviewing lesser works by well-established publishers, whether direct-to-library or university presses, it is often a welcome relief to…

Hefting the Masterpieces: Filmworker »

By Elizabeth Toohey. Do we really need another Stanley Kubrick documentary? There’s the comprehensive Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001), with its reverent celebrity talking-heads – Tom…

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“As Usual, Ladies First”: Manners, Manuals, and The Hunger Games »

By Richmond B. Adams. During “The Reaping” sequence from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) “volunteer[s] as tribute” to save her younger sister Primrose (Willow…

Consistent Passion, Little Fanfare: RBG »

By Elizabeth Toohey. Towards the end of the powerful new documentary RBG, we follow the 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a sculpture garden where she is…

Genius in Collaboration: The Outer Limits, Season One from Kino Lorber »

By Tony Williams. I saw my first episode of The Outer Limits on a regional independent television station in the mid-60s. Opening with the evocative credit sequence “There…

Beauty and the Dogs: Women’s Revolution in Tunisian Cinema »

By Matthew Fullerton. As Hollywood grapples with diversity issues, it is interesting to note how Tunisia, an emergent democracy since its 2011 revolution, has witnessed women filmmakers moving…

Family Values and Civic Duties: Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day »

By Jeremy Carr. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was particularly adept at transitioning between the cinema and television (and theater, for that matter), starting the crossover just a few films in…

Unlovely Spectacle: D.A. Miller on Call Me By Your Name »

By David Greven. An exchange I had with an older, straight, white academic in Film Studies serves as an instructive example of a particular phenomenon that I will…

Marcel Pagnol’s “Marseille Trilogy”: An Essential Reemerges on Criterion »

By Christopher Weedman. Among the most impressive film restorations of 2017 was Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy (1931-36), which I reviewed last March when Janus Films screened it theatrically…

Festival Reports

Nightmares from LA and von Trier: 2018 Cannes, Week Two »

By Ali Moosavi. It is very unusual for Cannes, or indeed any film festival that I care to remember, to provide a warning in the festival program for a particular film. In Cannes…

By Gary M. Kramer. The 20th Maryland Film Festival, held at the Parkway Theater and various additional venues in Baltimore, took place May 2-6. The program included more than 100 features, documentaries, and shorts.…

By Ali Moosavi. The honor of opening the 71st Cannes Film Festival went to the Iranian director, and multi Oscar winner, Asghar Farhadi’s new film Everybody Knows. This thriller stars the real-life couple Javier…

By N. Buket Cengiz. The Istanbul Film Festival, organised by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) for the 37th time on 6-17 April 2018, was introduced back in February with a poster in…

By Gary M. Kramer. On March 10, the Miami Film Festival will premiere ten short films in two consecutive programs screening at the Tower Theater. The first program, The Things They Left Behind…

By Randy Malamud. I didn’t see the Aurora Borealis during my October visit to the Reykjavík International Film Festival, probably because I spent every night at the movies, but I did have some…

By Gary M. Kramer. The shorts programs at the 55th New York Film Festival are divided into three narrative sections: Narrative, Genre Stories, New York Stories, and there are some real gems among…

By Jordan R. Young. To vintage film enthusiasts–more than 28,000 last year–April means it’s time for the TCM Classic Film Festival. The eighth annual event took place over three days and four nights…

Interview

Life Commodified: Adilkhan Yerzhanov on Gentle Indifference of the World »

By Ali Moosavi. When discussing world cinema, Kazakhstan is not a country which immediately springs to mind. Like many of…

By Gary M. Kramer. América, directed by Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, is a lovely, poignant meditation on eldercare.…

By Tom Ue. Emmy Award-winner Jeffrey Schwarz’s many documentaries include Tab Hunter Confidential (2015), about the 1950s heartthrob and movie…

By Ali Moosavi. Many film aficionados’ first memory of Thailand dates back to the 1956 film The King and I…

By Sergey Toymentsev. Piotr Szkopiak’s The Last Witness offers a fictional rendition of a cold-blooded execution of 22,000 Polish…

By Alex Ramon. From the patriarchy-busting provocations of his debut feature Sitcom (1998) to the understated elegance of Frantz (2016),…

By Gary M. Kramer. Julia Katherine is a trans actress with insomnia. In I Remember the Crows, her director,…

By Gary M. Kramer. Daniel Patrick Carbone made a splash at the Tribeca Film Festival back in 2013 with…

By Tom Ue. Director Sherren Lee’s latest offering, the short film “The Things You Think I’m Thinking” follows a date…

Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species…

By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival, unspooling April 18-29, features 10 competitive shorts programs curated…

Tony Williams: A very valuable tourist guide to the southern Illinois area and its decrepit new millennium...
Christopher Sharrett: Lewis apparently liked the South. I’d prefer to see Two Thousand Maniacs as the ultimate...
Paul: Fine job, Peter.
Tony Williams: Thanks, Chris. History and knowledge of the past does matter. That is why I get so mad at inane...
Christopher Sharrett: I can’t argue, David. Very supple, perceptive observations.

Review

Fiercely Unpredictable: First Reformed »

By Thomas Puhr. Paul Schrader takes Christianity seriously: no small feat, given that many “Christian” movies today are of the schmaltzy, Sunday School variety (i.e. God’s Not Dead, Heaven Is…

Hereditary: The Mother Again »

By Christopher Sharrett. As the end credits roll for Ari Aster’s horror film Hereditary, we hear Judy Collins sing her hit song from the 60s, “Both Sides Now,” appropriate for…

Beyond the “Jacksplosion” – Quintessential Jack: The Art of Jack Nicholson on Screen by Scott Edwards »

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. Scott Edwards’s new book (McFarland, 2018) is anything but a garden variety biography of an American A-list actor. There’s no story here of…

Gore Down South: Two Thousand Maniacs! (Arrow Video) »

By Jeremy Carr. As noted by no less an authority than Mr. MonsterVision himself, Joe Bob Briggs, to distinguish a good Herschell Gordon Lewis film from one that is of…

A Treat Grows in Brooklyn: Hearts Beat Loud »

By Elias Savada. One way or another, I always seem to get a plastic high when watching a film with an old fashioned record store. High Fidelity (2000), Empire Records…

In Awe of Everything: The Gospel According to André »

By Janine Gericke. I’ll start by saying that The Gospel According to André is a delightful film about a delightful human. The film is enthralling and made me laugh out…

The Feminist Battle for Respect – The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist by Michelle Morgan »

A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. Whenever one sets out to write a book about a real-life person, be it a traditional biography or any other kind of study or…

Arthouse Redux: Claire’s Camera »

By Elias Savada. I’m a latecomer to the work of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, but I recently caught Night and Day (2004) and Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), which reveal…

Mountain: Epic to the Extreme »

By Elias Savada. The word “breathtaking” doesn’t do justice to Australian documentarian Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain. It’s so far beyond that. The manner of the imposing photography, which often suggests someone climbing…

Mungiu’s Deceptive Simplicity: Beyond the Hills (Criterion Collection) »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have commented on this site at length on Cristian Mungiu’s masterpiece Beyond the Hills (2012), and while it deserves thorough revaluation, I will note merely its…

Bumpy Origins – Solo: A Star Wars Story »

By Elias Savada, In a galaxy far, far away, veteran multi-hyphenate filmmaker Ron Howard has directed Solo with a sure, reliable hand, cobbling together the second standalone Star Wars Story (following…

Frustratingly Real: Disobedience »

By Janine Gericke. Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience is a frustrating film. Not because of poor performances or a meandering story, but because it’s so real. Based on the novel by Naomi…

Beyond the Surface: Cinema’s Baroque Flesh by Saige Walton »

A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. Through the course of Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), author Saige Walton promotes several fascinating…

A Beautiful Crash Course – Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat »

By Janine Gericke. Clocking in at a cool 78 minutes, Sara Driver’s documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat is a Basquiat crash course. The film…

Deadpool 2: Shtick Happens. Again. »

By Elias Savada. So, as numerous superhero universes collide in worldwide multiplexes, you might wonder if there is an escalating case of mega-budget overload on the horizon. 20th Century-Fox’s Deadpool 2…

Comic Discoveries – The Marcel Perez Collection: Vol. 2 »

By Jeremy Carr. Marcel Perez certainly isn’t the most renowned name in silent screen comedy. He’s likely not even among its top ten most recognizable figures. But that didn’t stop…

Times Remembered – Junior Bonner: The Making of a Classic with Steve McQueen and Sam Peckinpah in the Summer of 1971 by Jeb Rosebrook with Stuart Rosebrook »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. It is frequently true that publishers like Bear Manor Media not only offer the possibility of valuable access to books that are rarely considered…

Beautiful Hopelessness: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here »

By Thomas Puhr. On paper, Lynne Ramsay’s breathtaking You Were Never Really Here (2017) sounds like one of Luc Besson’s off-the-cuff side projects, ala Taken (2008) or Colombiana (2011). After…

An Insufficient Measure of Novelty: Jim Loach’s Measure of a Man (2018) »

By Brandon Konecny. There’s a scene in Measure of a Man where Bobby (Blake Cooper) bickers with his sister Michelle (Liana Liberato) after she knocked the scoop off his chocolate-dipped ice…

Market Values – Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television by Simon Brown »

The Shining (1980) A Book Review by Tony Williams. During my final year in what was soon becoming Thatcher’s “green and septic isle” even before Blair and Tessie, I read…

A Modern Classic Revised: The French Cinema Book, 2nd Edition, Edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt »

A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. In 2004, Michael Temple and Michael Witt published the first edition of The French Cinema Book (Palgrave/BFI, 2018) – an extremely welcome volume that succeeded in…

By Tony Williams. It appears very unusual to think that the debonair star we tend to think of as an actual person…

By Alex Brannan. To break it down into the simplest of taxonomies, there are two types of horror anthology film: those which…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This concisely written and informative monograph represents a critical examination of the role cityscapes play within…

By Elias Savada. It’s fitting that this refreshing documentary starts out with the world renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman performing a rousing rendition of…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have no reservations about using a central, foundational handbook serving women as the subtitle to this piece (in…

By Elias Savada. I’ve been a fan of horror maestros Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead ever since catching their 2012 feature debut Resolution…

By Alex Brannan. There is a critical stigma to the small subset of films that comprise the rape-revenge genre – or, at the…

By Jeremy Carr. Even if there wasn’t a compelling, underlying thesis to Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda: 1933–1945, this…

By Dean Goldberg. While I’ll admit that Pong was the last video game I had any interest in and more recently got sea…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. According to an old saying about not judging a book by its cover, the same can…

By Travis Merchant. Recently, the rise of extreme right-wing groups and individuals have done more than upset the quotidian structure to society. More often than…

By Jeremy Carr. On the day of her son’s wedding, presumably the central event of 1945, drug-addled Anna (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) ominously observes,…

A Book Review by Dean Goldberg. While the introduction to this collection of published essays from the storied Spectator, the University of…

By Travis Merchant. A decade has passed since the beginning of an economic recession that many still feel today. The recession of 2008…

By Elias Savada. I didn’t like Max Winkler’s first feature, the dreary comedy Ceremony (2011), a quirky tic of a wedding crasher…

By John Duncan Talbird. In the opening of the new documentary, Leaning Into the Wind, artist Andy Goldsworthy tours a small home in…

By Elias Savada. Children dealing with their fears – although not those anxieties normally associated with horror genre tropes like The Dark, Loud…

By Jake Rutkowski. The process of interpersonal grievances and small-scale ironies rippling out into matters of national security is at this point a…

By Elias Savada. If I were a 12-year-old girl (particularly one of color), I probably would be anxiously awaiting, with all my BFFs,…

By Anthony Uzarowski. Hedy Lamarr was a movie star for whom the term glamour might have been invented. As far as celluloid goddesses go,…

By Elias Savada. In case you’re not feeling enough dread after watching Natalie Portman push her way through The Shimmer in the…

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. When James Quandt coined the term “New French Extremity” in a piece for ArtForum, he referred…

By Elias Savada. The Mummy was a huge, expensive flop last year, and relics of the archaeology digs genre are still up and…

By Jeremy Carr. It takes a sustained suspension of disbelief to accept what is tendered by Tomorrow is Forever. To permit the premise…

By Devapriya Sanyal. Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha looks at the lives of four women who live in Hawai manzil: Bua ji, who…

A Book Review by Louis Wasser. “I’m the last of Hollywood’s dinosaurs.” – Jean Negulesco (124) Although, in retrospect, the stars seemed…

By Elias Savada. There have been plenty of movies that have skewered the sunbaked air of Los Angeles and the strange people who…

By Elias Savada. Russian-born and German-trained Alisa Berger shows off her experimental and artistic tendencies in The Astronaut’s Bodies, a graduation project…

By Elias Savada. With less than a month before we find out how many Academy Awards The Shape of Water will actually win,…

By Gary M. Kramer. The best short films hook viewers, carry them through the story, and deliver a surprising finish. Animation is…

A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. In the 1950s female movie stars were expected to be more than human. For a price…

By Elias Savada. When 46-year-old automobile mechanic Tony George Hanna (a piercing-eyed Adel Karam) is first seen in The Insult, he’s at an…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Ripping England is the latest of two recent studies by American academics devoted to aspects of…

A Book Review by Robert Buckeye. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabainares (1963), a soldier at a cinema for the first time sees a…

By Christopher Sharrett. I hope that Steven Spielberg’s The Post ignites more interest in the standard media, at a time when blogs…

By Elias Savada. Christmas comes but once a year, but folks who like the holiday’s sweet joy and heartfelt message might take a…

By Elias Savada. Nicolas Cage, like Bruce Willis, seems to be trying everything and anything to reinvent his career. Or find a wider…

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. “I’m always lonely when I work…You’re going through a very private inner experience that requires personal…

By Christopher Sharrett. I’ve kept in mind Luca Guadagnino since his 2009 film I Am Love, which made such good use of…

By John Duncan Talbird. “Everything under the sun is art,” Joseph Beuys famously – or fatuously, depending on your point of view –…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Upon reviewing Ingrid Pitt, Queen of Horror: The Complete Career (McFarland, 2018, revised from a 2010…

By Elias Savada. Little did Elton John realize that the filmmakers behind Crazy Famous, a lame adventure comedy set in an Upstate New…

By Dean Goldberg. Like many a baby-boomer it was television that brought the movies into my life and introduced me to the…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. “I hate Spielberg, because none of his movies are honest…He is fascist, because America is the…

By Christopher Sharrett. The release last season of Darren Aronovsky’s Mother! was the unfortunate occasion for another assessment of the American mind. The…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. A history of soviet cinema, encompassing the films of Russia as well as the non-Russian former…

By Jeremy Carr. Young Haya is having a rough time. At the beginning of the documentary Miss Kiet’s Children, this precocious primary school…

By Elias Savada. When Guillermo del Toro makes a film, people take notice. For me, these are delicious, often unsettling – and sensitive…

A Book Review by Cecilia A. Zoppelletto. Charting the recent film industry of an entire continent is an unimaginable task and, even…

By Elias Savada. Woody Allen has gone dumpster diving. His new film, Wonder Wheel, is anything but wondrous. In fact, it stinks. The…

More Than a Headrush: Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage (1988) »

By Matthew Sorrento. After the release of his horror-comedy Re-Animator (1985), debuting filmmaker Stuart Gordon was very conscious that the film would…

By Tony Williams. 1946 was an “annus mirabilis” (“amazing year” for those who never studied Latin) for American, British film noir, and…

By Tony Williams. Following the release of several new remastered DVDs after the 2015 Orson Welles Centenary and the expected completion of…

A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. “Even today, I’ve no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it.”…

By Tony Williams. This is the moment when the Italianization of the Western was complete. –Alberto Moravia, quoted by Christopher Frayling As…

By Christopher Sharrett. One of the characteristics of our militarized society, aside from the constant deluge of cop shows, superhero movies, and…

By Christopher Weedman. Walter Matthau (1920-2000) was among Hollywood’s most charismatic stars of the late 1960s and 1970s. During this fascinating period…

By Christopher Sharrett. I count Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) among his supreme masterpieces, along with Code Unknown (2000), Cache (2005),…

By Johannes Schönherr. New York City, June 27th 1993: Notorious punk rocker GG Allin had finally served out a lengthy prison sentence in…

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. David Simon’s television series The Wire ran on HBO from 2002-2008, five seasons of a…

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. The Indian film critics have done it again! As Glover and Kaplan state in their book Genders, the term “gender”…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. It is as if in movies, TV and books, genre progresses through a series of…

By Heather Hendershot. One week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here reached the #9 position in book sales on Amazon. Brave…

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. It may be tempting to recommend Scarface (1932) or Little Caesar (1930) as a first…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Many decades ago I heard a comment made by a respected scholar, and affirmed by…

by John Andrew Gallagher. Tay Garnett and and writer Howard Higgin spent the months of February and March, 1930 on Catalina Island…

By Christopher Weedman. The Criterion Collection deserves to be commended for their continued efforts to bring greater attention to the underappreciated films…

By Christopher Sharrett. Readers will note that my title derives from essays and certain phrases by Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F.…

By Brandon Konecny. It has been suggested, sometimes by Moldovan film professionals themselves, that cinema does not currently exist in the Republic…

By Orville Lloyd Douglas. Black people are still mentally enslaved; even in the 21st century there is a psychic need by some…

By Tony Williams. As I write, hours tick away for the latest unimportant event in film history – the Hollywood Academy Awards…

By Christopher Weedman. The past couple of months have been full of rich rewards for admirers of the late Abel Gance. This…

By Anthony J. Steinbock. The Maltese Falcon is often considered to be the first film noir of the classical noir period (beginning…

By Johannes Schönherr. The Lovers and the Despot, a 2016 documentary by British directors Robert Cannan and Ross Adam, tackles an especially…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have always thought that John Sturges’s 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven has suffered too unfavorably in comparison to…

By Tony Williams. Although this special Criterion three film DVD set has been available since 2008, it is only recently that I…

By Tony Williams. Long awaited by many, following either unavailability or dubious accessibility via duped 16mm copies, unwatchable VHS copies, and bootlegged…

By Ramin S. Khanjani. Of all directors associated with the pre-1979 “Iranian New Wave,” Nosratallah Karimi probably presents one odd case for…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about last year’s superb achievement by Laszlo…

By Michael Betancourt. Michael Morris’ expanded cinema performances, Second Hermeneutic (2013) lasting approximately nine minutes, and Third Hermeneutic (2014) lasting approximately eleven minutes,…

By Tony Williams. “She was so much more than the Green woman in Star Trek” (George Pappy DVD audio-commentary). “What I knew I…

By David Ryan. Before United 93 opened ten years ago, the film’s previews were greeted with varying degrees of stress and grief.…

By Anthony Uzarowski. The 1950s are often seen as the time of Hollywood’s greatest splendour, yet the reality of the time was…

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

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