Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

In Defense of Hitchcock and Serious Criticism »

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

Lemmy Caution & Dr. Von Braun in Alphaville

Humanities in the Digital Era »

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

The Fault in Our Films: Hollywood and the Illness Narrative »

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

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…

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

The Life of Paganini: Bernard Rose on The Devil’s Violinist (2013) »

By Jude Warne. Bernard Rose is a firm believer of the interrelations of film and music. Music always seems…

By Matthew Sorrento. John Boorman’s status as a major filmmaker was sealed with five words from Lee Marvin: “I defer…

By Paul Risker. From the pages of Alan Smith’s Here Be Monsters! (2005) Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi release…

By Paul Risker. For Life Itself (2014) – a prominent snub by the Academy in the documentary category this year –…

By Amir Ganjavie and Shadi Javadi Abhari. The future of the western film genre, with its generic pattern, relation…

By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the writers busy in print and onscreen, it’s great to see Nick Antosca having…

By Paul Risker. Katharine Isabelle’s discovery of films could not have been more different than my own. My place…

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,…

P. Blart: Great article!
Christopher Sharrett: Robert, This is such exacting, well-argued criticism, a model for young people. Wheeler has...
Tony Williams: To modify a well known film title – Lightning over Wheeler!
Robert K. Lightning: Thanks Wheeler for your support… and for being a good sport.
Wheeler Winston Dxon: Yes, I agree with Paul completely – this is a superb interview. This was the key moment...

Review

So It Goes in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) »

By Matthew Sorrento. In his essay “A Spanner in the Works?: Genre, Narrative and the Hollywood Comedian,” Frank Krutnik details how classical Hollywood comedies were built around a star comedian. Designed…

A Future for Indigenous Media Studies: The Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand, Ed. Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas (2013) »

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. With a fascinating lineage spanning from the Treaty of Waitangi to the inception of the first ever state-funded Indigenous television station, New Zealand has…

Girlhood: A Sundance Review »

By Jacob Mertens. In an early sequence in Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, a group of girls walk home at night after a football game, weaving through featureless concrete high rises. One…

Waiting Around for Something to Happen: Don Carpenter and The Hollywood Trilogy »

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Don Carpenter killed himself in 1995. He was a writer’s writer, never famous for the ten or so novels, dozens of stories, or screenplays…

Sundays and Cybèle: Serge Bourguignon’s Oscar Winner Now on Criterion »

By Jude Warne. On April 8th 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, it was announced that Serge Bourguignon’s film Sundays and Cybèle had won the Academy Award for Best…

99 Homes: A Sundance Review »

By Jacob Mertens. Ramin Bahrani—known in the indie festival circuit for his subtle, observational features Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007), and Goodbye Solo (2008)—enters the current festival year…

The Duke of Burgundy: Sex Film, No Nudity »

By John Duncan Talbird. Peter Strickland’s new film, The Duke of Burgundy, is a cleverly beautiful and beautifully crafted exploration of the humiliation of servitude and the power struggles that…

Two Days, One Night: Woman at Work »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to applaud the work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Their new film Two Days, One Night seems the appropriate occasion…

Hans Helmut Prinzler’s Sirens & Sinners: A Visual History of Weimar Film 1918-1933 (2013) »

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Having reviewed books on cinema, one of its main pleasures is discovering unexplored clefts in the art’s brief history. There’s always something new. Did…

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…

By Christopher Sharrett. I was far more impressed than I thought I might be with Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, a compelling film at…

By Chris Neilan. Between 1945 and 1957 Greek born Elia Kazantzoglou had no directorial equal in Hollywood. The films he made in…

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In his 1968 study The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, Andrew Sarris wrote that Samuel Fuller…

By William Repass. In Damien Chazelle’s new film Whiplash (2014), aspiring jazz drummer and conservatory freshman Andrew (Miles Teller) and his father…

By James Teitelbaum. Near the end of The Missing Picture, director Rithy Panh’s grim memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge regime…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godard called his masterwork Weekend (1967) “a film lost in the cosmos – a film found on the…

By John Duncan Talbird. No person looks into the camera in a Frederick Wiseman documentary. Some critics use the term cinéma vérité…

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…

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…

Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror: On Political Film in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema »

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…

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,…