Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

The Brethren of GG (i.e., Jesus Christ) Allin: The Allins »

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

Working for the Police, Working for the City, or Selling Drugs: Stanley Corkin’s Connecting The Wire »

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 prestige show that, in the less…

The Indian Film Critics Have Done It Again!: Reading Gender in Ki & Ka Through the Cinematic Lens of R. Balki »

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” itself is rather slippery. Such complicated…

The Year of the Kneale Olympics – Into the Unknown: the Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray and We Are the Martians edited by Neil Snowdon »

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

Facts are Not Stupid Things: Lessons from The Reagan Show »

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 New World held the #15 slot.…

Still More to the Story: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! by Scott Allen Nollen and Paul Muni by Michael B. Druxman »

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. It may be tempting to recommend Scarface (1932) or Little Caesar (1930) as a first viewing to newcomers of pre-Code. However,…

Master of Italian Gothic – Riccardo Freda: The Life and Works of a Born Filmmaker by Roberto Curti »

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

When Tay Garnett Met Frankie and Johnnie: Her Man (1930) »

by John Andrew Gallagher. Tay Garnett and and writer Howard Higgin spent the months of February and March, 1930 on Catalina Island writing Her Man, sharing a house…

The Roots of Social Change: Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs on Criterion »

By Christopher Weedman. The Criterion Collection deserves to be commended for their continued efforts to bring greater attention to the underappreciated films of director Ermanno Olmi. It is…

The Function of Film Criticism at Any Time »

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

All God’s Children (Toti copiii domnului, 2012)

A Forgotten Country’s Forgotten Cinema: Searching for Hope in Post-Soviet Moldovan Cinema »

By Brandon Konecny. It has been suggested, sometimes by Moldovan film professionals themselves, that cinema does not currently exist in the Republic of Moldova, Europe’s poorest and perhaps…

Festival Reports

Highlights from the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival »

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…

The Beksińskis: A Sound and Picture Album

By Alex Ramon. Now in its seventh year, Poland’s Transatlantyk Festival remains a spearheading festival in a country that, despite its current volatile political climate, doesn’t yet lack for dynamic, high-profile cultural events:…

By Robert Buckeye. Art Film Fest in Košice, Slovakia (16-24 June) provided greater opportunities for those who seek out film however they can by screening films that were seen recently and awarded at…

By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale and Thessaloniki Film Festival are two of the finest film festivals in Europe. Viennale curates the best arthouse films of the year from all major film festivals and is…

By Yun-hua Chen. Doku.Arts Essaybox and Around The World in 14 Films are embellishing Berlin’s autumn cinemascape for sure, each in its own way. The former prides itself on the curation of documentaries…

By Gary M. Kramer. The short documentary films at this year’s AFI DOCS ranged from the political to the personal. The political shorts were part of the festival’s “World Views” program. One of…

By Gary M. Kramer. Ecuadorian cinema has been booming in recent years, and the 3rd Ecuadorian Film Festival in New York, June 9-17, showcases films by some of the most intriguing directors from…

By Ali Moosavi. In A Gentle Creature, by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa which played at the Cannes Official Competition, a woman in a Russian village receives a parcel, which she had sent to…

Interview

Always Fearless: An Interview with Karen Allen on Year by the Sea »

By Tom Ue. Actress and director Karen Allen may be best known for her performance as the fearless heroine…

By Tom Ue. We Forgot to Break Up is having its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Directed…

By Melissa Webb. Born in 1955 in Flushing, New York, John Gallagher has been an integral player in New York…

By Sergey Toymentsev. Johnny O’Reilly is an Irish director making movies in Russia and with an exclusively Russian cast. Such…

By Jeremy Carr. The Lodgers is a gothic horror tale set in 1920 Ireland. Directed by Brian O’Malley, it is…

By Pete Donnelly. Left in the wake of rock and roll’s growing popularity, jazz icons essentially stood as living monuments…

By Anna Weinstein. Released in May 2017, Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology includes nearly eleven hours of material…

By Elias Savada. This wasn’t supposed to be an interview. While writing my review of the Blu-Ray of his…

By Neila Driss. The Egyptian screenwriter and director Mohamed Diab is a bold filmmaker, unafraid of tackling subjects that…

By Martin Kudláč. Marko Zaror, Chilean-born martial artist known from the films of Robert Rodriguez, stars as the nemesis, Rastingac, to…

By Jeremy Carr. Before ever beginning his debut feature film, director Mathieu Ratthe had proven himself adept at two critical…

Tony Williams: Thank you, Adrian. Contrary to my initial expectations due to doing too many reviews as necessary...
Adrian Danks: Thanks for this terrific review Tony. Barrett is indeed a key and highly influential figure in...
Christopher Weedman: Thank you for the kind words, Chris. It is a great to see Demy finally getting the respect he...
Tony Williams: Well said, Chris. I feel that Bogart’s final lines at the end of THE HARDER THEY FALL (1956) be...
Christopher Sharrett: There have, of course, been adaptations of Hard Times on the BBC, all a bit polite....

Review

Life on Hold: Mike Leigh’s Meantime (Criterion Collection) »

By Jeremy Carr. Based solely on his latest string of features – Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year (2010), Mr. Turner (2014) – one might reasonably assume all Mike Leigh films are mostly…

A Time to Live, a Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985)

Culture, Style, Voice, Motion: The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien by Christopher Lupke »

A Book Review by Yun-hua Chen. Christopher Lupke’s The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion (Cambria, 2016) is a well-informed book straddling between the disciplines of…

All That’s Lost: Rebecca from the Criterion Collection »

By Tony Williams. Criterion initially offered Rebecca (1940) on a 2-disc DVD edition in 2001 but following loss of copyright a few years later it became an expensive collector’s item,…

Chloe Webb and Gary Oldman in the film Sid and Nancy

Love Kills: Sid & Nancy from the Criterion Collection »

By Jeremy Carr. Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox’s 1986 biopic about raucous Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and his equally rowdy girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb), begins in the…

Stephen King’s IT: Unneeded Horrors »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have never much admired the horror fiction of Stephen King, which I’ve called the “hoagie sandwich” approach to the genre, with numerous conventions, images, and devices…

The Sublime Beauty of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on Criterion »

By Christopher Weedman. When celebrated French film director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand were experiencing difficulty securing financing for Les parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Italian producer Carlo…

Cultivating Young Minds: School Life »

By Elias Savada. In the quaint, historic town of Kells in County Meath, home to Ireland’s only independent documentary film festival, it seems rather fitting that this is also the locale…

Catharsis, Backstage and Beyond: Spettacolo »

By Jeremy Carr. There was no plan to launch an annual undertaking where the residents of Monticchiello, a small Tuscan village, would enact theatrical renderings of their own lives in an…

Anti Matter: Alice Tumbles Down the Wormhole »

By Elias Savada. Memory loss and Queen of Hearts madness team up against a you-shouldn’t-play-with-Mother-Nature anti-hero in Anti Matter, an ambitious and entertaining sci-fi effort from director-writer Keir Burrows. He’s a…

Updating the Debate – The Elusive Auteur: The Question of Film Authorship Throughout the Age of Cinema by Barrett Hodsdon »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Barrett Hodsdon is an unfamiliar name to me, chiefly because I do not reside in Australia. However, like Victor Perkins, he seems to have…

A World of One’s Own: The Endearing Humanity of Pavel Cuzuioc’s Secondo Me »

By Brandon Konecny. Pavel Cuzuioc is a filmmaker with a flair for creating thoughtful meditations on working-class people, and he doesn’t diverge from this course in his recent documentary Secondo…

Cops, Criminals, and Cultural Revolution: The Nile Hilton Incident »

By Jeremy Carr. There are bound to be comparisons made between Tarik Saleh’s The Nile Hilton Incident and several films of the past. Understandably so. This 2017 thriller, a multinational coproduction,…

Daughter of the South, Star Across Borders – Ava: A Life in Movies by Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski »

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. I once confessed to a friend that, despite my preoccupation with serious film, I remained guilty of sporting an unabashed crush on Ava…

The Last Hurrah of John Garfield: Criterion’s The Breaking Point (1950) »

By Tony Williams. Since the inclusion of a co-written article by Tom Flinn and John Davis in the pre-David Bordwell University of Wisconsin-Madison era of The Velvet Light Trap (in…

Gilda Lost and Gilda Regained: Concerning The Lady Eve’s Destructive Relationship with Two Sexually Confused Adams »

By James Churchill. Nobody forgets the first time they experienced Hayworth’s sudden emergence from the bottom of the frame in Gilda. The quick snap of the head that sends her hair…

A Workman Finding His Artistry: The Cinematography of Roger Corman by Pawel Aleksandrowicz »

A Book Review by Brad Cook. For many film fans, myself included, the name Roger Corman typically evokes an immediate response: That guy who makes schlocky movies quickly and cheaply and…

Siri Grows Up: Marjorie Prime »

By Elias Savada. In a lovely, earth-toned Long Island beach house, Walter Lancaster (Jon Hamm) comes and goes in rather disconcerting fashion. He doesn’t use the door or walk in…

Marion_Davies_-_Arthur_Forrest_-_1922_-_When_Knighthood_Was_In_Flower

The Cinematic Culture of Conspicuous Consumption – When Knighthood was in Flower (1922) »

By Tony Williams. Like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recently released Endless Poetry (2016) and Samantha Fuller’s tribute to her late father A Fuller Life (2013), the DVD restoration of one of Marion…

I Did…You Shouldn’t: I Do…Until I Don’t »

By Elias Savada. There are problems a-plenty in Vero Beach, Florida, and after watching them dribble forth in the lame ensemble comedy I Do…Until I Don’t, I feel that this…

The Trip to Spain: A Road Best Not Taken »

By Elias Savada. Always light-hearted and entertaining, the deadpan road films featuring the improvisation talents of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have christened their third voyage, The Trip to Spain, after…

A Book Review by Gary M. Kramer. Killing Off the Lesbians by Liz Millward, Janice G. Dodd and Irene Fubara-Manuel (McFarland, 2017) addresses the…

A Book Review by Ipek A. Celik Rappas. The Other Air Force explores post-9/11 US investments in Middle Eastern broadcasting initiatives especially…

By Elias Savada. Taking a film out of distribution purgatory, Garagehouse Pictures is the final link in a rescue involving an obscure…

By Elias Savada. Is there any way to regain whatever amount of dignity an actor has gained in his career after he’s played…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Before the successful re-launching of We Are the Martians, editor Neil Snowdon initiated a new series…

By Jeremy Carr. Escapes, a new documentary from director Michael Almereyda and executive producer Wes Anderson, begins with Philip K. Dick’s ruminations on…

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Say the name and the image of an overweight, balding man with a neatly trimmed beard…

By Kate Hearst. As statistics continue to demonstrate the persistent imbalance of women’s representation on screen,[1] Pedro Almodovar’s Women On the Verge…

By Elias Savada. The phrase “lump of coal” comes to mind after watching The Dark Tower, a lavish and most definitely lackluster CliffsNotes…

By Jeremy Carr. While watching After Love, a 2016 film about a Brussels couple in the midst of an emotionally evolving but physically…

By Elias Savada. “A naked virgin will illuminate your path with a blazing butterfly.” Yes, just the kind of fertile, fantastic utterance you…

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. On the banks of the Padma lives Padma Halder, named after one of the bigger rivers flowing between the…

By Elias Savada. Three years ago, filmmaker Gillian Robespierre arrived at the Sundance Film Festival with her first feature, Obvious Child, a small,…

By Jeremy Carr. Two credits stand out on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film Rumble Fish. One is Stewart Copeland, then drummer for The…

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Frederic Mermoud’s French-thriller Moka (2016) centers on a grieving woman who is on the hunt for the…

By Christopher Sharrett. There are certainly films more perceptive about class and race than Beatriz at Dinner, a film I put off seeing since…

By Jessica Baxter. It’s been over 30 years since Albert Brooks unleashed his on-point satire about the mental unraveling of dissatisfied yuppies…

By Christopher Sharrett. The terms “ascetic” and “austere” are too-common adjectives applied to the films of Robert Bresson. It is reasonable to…

By Elias Savada. Bruce Willis still tracks 243 on the IMDB.com STARmeter scale (I’m at 1,325,678). All kind of entertainment folk are…

A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb’s Global Cinema Cities (Columbia UP, 2016) poses as its task to…

By Elias Savada. There is an elegant, simple beauty in documentarian Errol Morris’s affectionate portrait of his friend, soft-spoken, 80-year-old Elsa Dorfman, in…

By Devapriva Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini (2015) is the Bengali version of 2017’s much feted Begum Jaan, the film which served…

By Elias Savada. Part I: The Buildup So, how many teenagers have you met who say they want to make movies when they…

By Anthony Uzarowski. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK. There could be no better time…

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. If the glimpses we catch on screen of an actor’s body of work ultimately amount…

By John Duncan Talbird. Although not well known today, Nikolai Leskov was a famous Russian writer in the 19th century admired by such…

By Jeremy Carr. The first shot of Pop Aye (2017), Kirsten Tan’s feature film debut, shows the story’s two protagonists – the…

By Elias Savada. The hip medieval stew being served up in Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours is overcooked with naughty nuns sexually…

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Ideas, for Deleuze, do not exist above life as ideal forms but come from life as…

By Elias Savada. The sad fate and cruel savagery hoisted on many indigenous people have been part of an angst-filled sidebar on the…

By Elias Savada. With an omp pa pa, everybody sing! “Music Makes the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go…

A Book Review by Christopher Weedman. Steffen Hantke’s welcome new book Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of…

By Tony Williams. Although currently promoted mainly as a restoration of The Lodger (1927), a film that its director regarded as his…

By Elias Savada. There’s a lot of technical wizardry afoot in Dutch filmmaker Tim Smit’s feature directorial debut Kill Switch, an indie sci…

By Tony Williams. In 2003 Criterion issued a two-disk DVD version of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial Straw Dogs (1971) when the issue of…

By Tony Williams. Again Criterion have provided us with a welcome reissue of a classic film noir now in a new 2k digital…

By Martin Kudláč. In the 1996 film The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella is a scene with British soldiers examining a…

By Zhuo-Ning Su. Films are lives imagined, projected, simulated. When the play-pretend is effective and the make-believe works, we can hope to…

By Kate Hearst. With an artful lens, All This Panic captures the awkward and fleeting stage of teenagers on the cusp of…

By Elias Savada. If you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the system works. As a study…

By Christopher Sharrett. I should say at the outset that my thoughts about the social-political vision (or failure thereof) of Terry Zwigoff’s…

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Who would have figured the Canadian director of such diverse films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974),…

By Tony Williams. In his 2015 detailed and definitive study The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the…

By John Duncan Talbird. Terrance Davies’ most recent film, A Quiet Passion, is a strange drama. It is a biopic and a period…

By Ali Moosavi. Lynn Ramsey’s violent film noir was the last film to be shown at the Cannes Official Competition. It is based…

By Jeremy Carr. The 1980s was a pivotal period for horror films. As low-budget “Video Nasty” provocations steadily faded from America’s grindhouse…

By Elias Savada. There is a hidden recluse swirling around our theaters (and video on demand), and his name is Wakefield. Please…

The Lovers and the Despot: Forced Seduction, North Korean Style »

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…

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

By Film International. The editors’ Top 10 and Overrated 10 include films that were released in the editors’ respective regions during 2015.…

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

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

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

By David Ryan. Rewriting history is a common academic enterprise, and crafting Elizabethan history – particularly Shakespearean biography – is composed recursively. Though…

Kurt Vonnegut Hunter Thompson Norman Mailer Tom Wolfe William Burroughs Jonathan Miller William Burroughs Jr Jacob Bronowski Robert Hughes Bob Woodward Carl…

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

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

By Christopher Sharrett. When I first took note of the television series Madam Secretary (2014-), I assumed it was a sort of…

By Richard Grigg. Director Guy Ritchie’s 2015 film The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is of course inspired by the U.S. television series of…

By Ramin S. Khanjani. For many avid followers of Iranian cinema across the world, the experience of this national cinema justifiably doesn’t…

By William Repass. In the thematic arc formed by Fellini’s body of work, La dolce vita (1960) can be said to represent…

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,…

The Brethren of GG (i.e., Jesus Christ) Allin: The Allins »

By Johannes Schönherr. New York City, June 27th 1993: Notorious punk rocker GG Allin had finally served out a lengthy prison sentence in Michigan and was set to play his first…

Working for the Police, Working for the City, or Selling Drugs: Stanley Corkin’s Connecting The Wire »

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 prestige show that, in the less than ten…

The Indian Film Critics Have Done It Again!: Reading Gender in Ki & Ka Through the Cinematic Lens of R. Balki »

The Year of the Kneale Olympics – Into the Unknown: the Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray and We Are the Martians edited by Neil Snowdon »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. It is as if in movies, TV and books, genre progresses through a series of metaphorical prison walls. Inferior and derivative work merely…