Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

The Babadook: Ghosts in the Bedroom »

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 has fallen on hard times in…

Revulsion and Derision: Antichrist, The Human Centipede II and the British Press »

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

Lost in Space »

By Rajko Radovic. “I’m gonna wait till the stars come out. And see them twinkle in your eyes. I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour.” (Wilson “the Wicked”…

“Isn’t it Bromantic?” – The Whole Damn Sony Mess, and What It Means »

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Now that some time has elapsed between the Sony hack and the release of the film that apparently precipitated it, Seth Rogen and Evan…

The Best of 2014 – and the Most Overrated »

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

Tati Time: Criterion Delivers The Complete Jacques Tati »

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

“A Giant Gutter in Outer Space”: On the Schopenhauerian Themes of HBO’s hit series True Detective »

By Mathijs Peters. Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which Samuel Beckett defined as “an intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted” (Büttner 2002: 115),…

The Radical Film Network: for sustainable, oppositional film culture »

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

Five Iranian Voices on Reza Mirkarimi’s Today »

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

“Turn It Off!” – Sound and Silence in 1960s British Gothic Cinema »

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

The Representation of Men in the Films of Abdol Reza Kahani, Houman Seyedi and Bahram Tavakoli »

By Asal Bagheri. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no. 3/2014, a special issue devoted to…

Festival Reports

The 58th BFI London Film Festival »

By Cleaver Patterson. Since its inception the BFI London Film Festival has – like the city which hosts it – prided itself in its ability to combine quirkiness with broad appeal. The result…

By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale 2014 continues with its good tradition of being an audience-friendly film festival, with a wide range of discussion panels, art installations, events and parties open to the public. There…

By Brenda Benthien. Cinefest, Hamburg’s international festival of German film history, focused this year on New Directions in Documentary Film. A range of volatile films from the 1960s through the 1980s illustrated how…

By Anthony Killick. The Brighton Palestine Film Festival is one of the latest contributions to the worldwide proliferation of film festivals dedicated to Palestinian liberation. Taking place from the 7th–9th November at the…

A makeshift sign indicating the whereabouts of the LRFF.

By Anthony Killick. “Kurdish people don’t just say democracy, we say radical democracy.” (Sema Yildiz) The Liverpool Radical Film Festival ran from the 13th–16th November. As part of an emerging UK wide Radical…

By Chris Neilan. The 19th Busan International Film Festival was, as ever, an unrivalled showground for Asian filmmaking talent. A handsome 312 films were screened this year (up from 299 last year) from…

Interview

Iran of Today: An Interview with Reza Mirkarimi »

By Amir Ganjavie. Reza Mirkarimi’s Today has been selected to represent Iran at the Oscars in 2015, after the film’s recent screening…

By Anna Weinstein. There are few documentaries about comic books and even fewer about women in comics. In fact,…

By Jude Warne. Mariana Rondon is an expert articulator of youth. In her award-winning 2007 film Postcards from Leningrad…

By Amir Ganjavie and Nojan Norouzi. Rakhshan Bani-E’temad officially represented Iran at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival with…

By Paul Risker. In a recent interview with Rolf De Heer, on the subject of influences and inspiration he told…

By Matthew Sorrento. “Victim culture” was a loaded term long before the recent killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown,…

By Paul Risker. When writer-director Andrew Adamson set out to adapt Lloyd Jones’ novel Mr. Pip (2006) Adamson was…

By Yun-hua Chen. Mohammed Ali Atassi brought his second documentary, Our Terrible Country, co-directed with Ziad Homsi, to the…

Greta Hopkins: Was Antichrist taken too far? Not quite… Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsburg were amazing, loved...
Martin J.: I’m with you, Gwendolyn! Steve Carrell isn’t my cup of tea but after reading so many praises I gave it a...
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Okay, I must add another film to my Top Ten of 2014. This film is so mesmeric and...
ken kennedy: looks great
Jason Levis: The idea that this film could only be a success if all the film reviewers of all the right-wing press...

Review

The Tedious Body Horror of Wetlands (2013) »

By James Teitelbaum. “The vagina reeks of life and love and the infinite et cetera. O vagina! Your salty incense, your mushroom moon musk, your deep waves of clam honey…

Photograph courtesey of John Sturrock/reportdigital.co.uk

Still The Enemy Within (Owen Gower, 2014, UK) »

By Anthony Killick. Owen Gower’s debut feature film offers a narrative of the 1984-85 miners strike, the loss of which has triggered three subsequent decades of neoliberal power consolidation. If…

American Sniper: War’s Glories »

By Christopher Sharrett. For a number of years there has been considerable critical palaver about the “ambiguities” of Clint Eastwood’s ideology, with monographs and essays on the topic published at…

Appropriate Behavior: Not a Chick Flick »

By John Duncan Talbird. Writer-Director Desiree Akhavan’s funny and touching first film, Appropriate Behavior, is one of a type of smart, simple dramas that have appeared over the past few…

Bridging the Divides: The Fine Lines of Crime Across 110th Street »

By Jeremy Carr. The holdup that begins the 1972 film Across 110th Street pits a trio of low-level amateurs against an established, well organized and, up to this point, efficient…

World Film Locations: Toronto: 2014 »

A Book Review By Carmen Siu. One hundred and eighty years young, the city of Toronto has a lot to boast about. ‘T-Dot’ is celebrated as a world-class city for its…

Foxcatcher: Wealth, Power, Repression »

By Christopher Sharrett. I was far more impressed than I thought I might be with Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, a compelling film at various subtle yet complex levels. I should say…

Elia Kazan’s Boomerang!: A Film of Qualified Pleasures »

By Chris Neilan. Between 1945 and 1957 Greek born Elia Kazantzoglou had no directorial equal in Hollywood. The films he made in that period were nominated for fifty Oscars, twelve…

Brainquake: the Last Samuel Fuller Novel »

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In his 1968 study The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, Andrew Sarris wrote that Samuel Fuller was an “authentic American primitive,” to mean, I…

Whiplash and the Deathliness of Co-opted Jazz »

By William Repass. In Damien Chazelle’s new film Whiplash (2014), aspiring jazz drummer and conservatory freshman Andrew (Miles Teller) and his father (Paul Reiser) meet at the cinema to enact…

Emotional Cleansing: Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013) »

By James Teitelbaum. Near the end of The Missing Picture, director Rithy Panh’s grim memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia, we see a clay figure…

The One I Love: Another Film Lost in The Cosmos »

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godard called his masterwork Weekend (1967) “a film lost in the cosmos – a film found on the scrapheap” in that movie’s intertitles, but at least…

The Lofty and the Humdrum: Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery »

By John Duncan Talbird. No person looks into the camera in a Frederick Wiseman documentary. Some critics use the term cinéma vérité to describe his type of filmmaking, but Wiseman…

Interstellar: A Faltering Exercise in Space-Bound Theatrics »

By Forrest Cardamenis. In what may prove to be Interstellar’s most memorable scene, Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper (that’s a last name; curiously, he is never given a first) is transported into…

By James Teitelbaum. Durban is the third-largest city in South Africa, and is the biggest port town on the continent’s Indian Ocean…

By Matthew Sorrento. He can “work all day, and creep all night,” stated Dr. James Grigson, nicknamed Dr. Death (for his penchant…

By Zhuo-Ning Su. Spanish writer/director Carlos Marques-Marcet’s 10.000 Km is the kind of movie that’s powered by so much honesty and insight that,…

By Janine Gericke. The Good Life is director Jean Denizot’s feature film debut, and it proves to be a solid one. The…

By Paul Risker. Cities rise, or fall, at the will of men. In a conflict of wills in 1944, Paris, the “City…

By Daniel Lindvall. At some point early on in Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic disaster film 2012 (2009) we know that 999.85 per mille…

By Zhuo-Ning Su. Swedish comedic drama Force Majeure is a sneaky, unsparing, surgically accurate stab to a very particular part of the human sensibility,…

By Sam Littman. Is Whiplash the most controversial film of the year? In January, the film was anointed the American indie to…

By Jeremy Carr. David Lynch, via the Criterion Collection’s newly released Blu-ray of Eraserhead (1977), includes a television calibration option as a…

By Christopher Sharrett. The films of Pawel Pawlikowski have only intermittently interested me. I found his Woman in the Fifth (2011) utterly…

By Jude Warne. Benny Loves Killing is director Ben Woodiwiss’ debut feature British film, and has multiple festival awards to its name,…

By Elroy Pinto. On the first anniversary of his death, the Films Division of India released a DVD set that features all…

By Christopher Sharrett. Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger strikes me as a necessary film at a time when the US political cinema…

By Zhuo-Ning Su. The Ukranian dramatic thriller The Tribe marks the arrival of a major directorial talent in Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, who delivers…

By Christopher Neilan. Pialat is not celebrated in the US like Truffaut, nor adored in critical circles like Godard and Melville. He’s…

By Jakub Wojnarowski. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) Every human writes her own story. But how could one make this narrative coherent, if every…

By Eija Niskanen. Sion Sono, Japanese cinema’s enfant terrible, has delved into the topic of the 2011 Northern Japan 3/11 triple disaster of…

By Christopher Sharrett. Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves was one of the few films of the last season that deserved real recognition and…

By Zhuo-Ning Su. Marking the sixth collaboration of what’s shaping up to be the most compelling and fruitful auteur-actor duo in modern…

By Noah Charney. For performance artists, their bodies are the canvas on which to paint, the marble from which to sculpt. Some…

By Matthew Sorrento. In 2008, the Criterion Collection issued Anthony Mann’s The Furies (1950) with the restored film sleeved alongside the 1948…

By Robert Kenneth Dator. As with any truly influential director, Federico Fellini—simply, Fellini—has been talked to death. However, with so much talk…

By Sam Littman. Within the first fifteen minutes of David Mackenzie’s prison drama Starred Up, it becomes clear that the titular felon,…

By Cleaver Patterson. American-made animated films appear to have a fascination with middle European cities and architecture. Take The Boxtrolls for instance: the latest…

By James Teitelbaum. The armed conflict in Columbia has now been claiming lives for fifty years. The Columbian government has been battling…

By Jeremy Carr. Sleep, My Love begins with a nightmarish state of panic as Alison Courtland (Claudette Colbert) wakes to find herself…

By Janine Gericke. Saxon Logan’s 1984 film Sleepwalker was once thought to be lost. Distributors weren’t sure how to market and sell…

By Mark James. Love is strange, and so is the real estate market these days, especially in New York. Love’s form can…

A Book Review by Shane Joaquin Jimenez. The Nest (2014), the latest film by David Cronenberg, is comprised of a single unbroken…

By Paul Risker. In my review of Alive Inside for Film International, the idea arose that the act of explaining one’s love…

By Jacob Mertens. At some point in watching modern spy films—be they centered around James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan, et al.—viewers…

By James Knight. “My sugar was carried away on ships, but my tears were left behind.” This year marks the fiftieth birthday…

A Book Review by Carmen Siu. Earlier this year, Avril Lavigne garnered considerable negative attention for her ‘Hello Kitty’ music video. Filmed in…

By Paul Risker. Earth: a world of sound within a vacuum, despite the best efforts of science fiction to convince us otherwise. Then…

By James Teitelbaum. The coolest thing about Joss Whedon’s film The Avengers (2012) is that it exists. The notion that four major…

By Gary M. Kramer. With the release of Joanna Hogg’s three features, Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013), it is imperative…

By Brandon Konecny. Apart from Faces (1968) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974), none of Cassavetes’ films were successful, both commercially…

Santo in the Museum of the Mexican Film Industry »

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…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This article caught my attention about a week ago, and though I blogged on it then, it seems…

By Robert K. Lightning. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) was Fritz Lang’s final U.S. film.[1] In several obvious ways it can be…

By Christopher Sharrett. The label “master of violence” was long ago affixed to director Sam Peckinpah. Books on Peckinpah with titles like…

By Laura Crossley. “The nation of course is not a desiring person but a fictive unity imposed on an aggregate of individuals,…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It’s a commonplace thing to discuss the individual vision of filmmakers, on both a national and international level,…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Mark Rutland: “What do you believe in?” Marnie Edgar: “Nothing.” (From Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie) Alfred Hitchcock is routinely…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Finally, a film about an older woman who has an affair, and doesn’t get punished by the narrative.…

By Christopher Sharrett. I did not see Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace during its initial run some months ago, in part…

By Christopher Sharrett. To Part 2. Hadewijch Hadewijch is the first of two films (the second is Hors Satan) directly focused on…

By Christopher Sharrett. To Part 1. L’Humanité Bruno Dumont’s second film has been termed by certain commentators a “remake” of La Vie…

By Christopher Sharrett. Bruno Dumont is among our most important filmmakers, a fact that has gone mostly unnoticed outside Europe. His particular…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “I hope it’s like a mirror.” (Călin Peter Netzer on Child’s Pose) “They fuck you up, your mum…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. To Part 1. While Dorothy Arzner’s Craig’s Wife (1936) revolves around a pathological female who is undone by…

By Stephen Gaunson. “I live here now and I don’t like going home.” (Andrew Dominik qtd. in Sperling 2012) “I wouldn’t mind…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Much has been deservedly written on Richard C. Sarafian’s existential road movie Vanishing Point (1971), a shambling, glorious…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. It’s instructive to study the work of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino in context with one another. Though…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Lately I’ve been thinking about black and white movies, and how they’ve almost completely disappeared from the current…

By Brian Russell Graham. A great many of the most popular films of recent decades are characterized by a character’s struggle to…

By Matthew Sorrento. I. The Look Robinson’s legion of fans grew after the actor delivered an intense desperation as Rico Bandello in…

By Jon Kraszewski. Coming at the end of a film series that had degenerated into useless portraits of cartoonish characters and simplified…

By Terence Diggory. CONTENTS The Critical Audience Dramatis Personae Child’s Play Alma Mater Sons and Lovers Fear of Lying Fear of Dying…

By Lesley Brill. In Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (most of the plot of which Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons follows faithfully),…

By Victoria Tickle. One-location (or one-room) films are films that do exactly what they say on their metaphorical tins: their narratives take…

By Christopher Sharrett. Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children (Á perdre la raison, a.k.a. Loving without Reason, a much more sensible title) put me…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “With poor and derisory resources, with the help and goodwill of those who have worked with me, I…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his…

By Victoria Tickle. Rape-revenge films are a controversial sub-genre of films that have been the subject of many critical debates surrounding feminism,…

By Will Dodson. Warner Home Video released a new Blu-ray set of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist on October 8, coinciding with the…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Noël Coward once observed that “television is for appearing on – not for looking at,” but as the…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. As an internationally acclaimed Japanese/American artist, Yayoi Kusama rejects any Orientalist assumptions about her work or her self.…