Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun »

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

The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist »

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

1970s Rape-Revenge Films and their Remakes: Changing Representations »

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

The Archaeology of Abjection in The Exorcist »

By Will Dodson. Warner Home Video released a new Blu-ray set of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist on October 8, coinciding with the film’s 40th anniversary. The occasion warrants,…

Light From the Screen: Cinema, Painting and Spectatorship »

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Noël Coward once observed that “television is for appearing on – not for looking at,” but as the twenty-first century takes firm hold of…

Yayoi Kusama: The Orgy of Self Obliteration »

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

Charles Burnett’s Inner City Portrait: Revisiting Killer of Sheep and the post-Watts crisis on film »

By Jamie Isbell. Charles Burnett’s UCLA thesis feature Killer of Sheep (1977) has become something of a retrospective masterpiece. A cult artifact speaking to one generation from another,…

Elvira Notari: A Woman in Search of Desire »

By Rossella Scalia. My first encounter with the director Elvira Notari occurred randomly, as almost always happens with important meetings. I had never heard of her nor…

Reconsidering The Landscape of the Homoerotic Body in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail »

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. I begin, as my title suggests, with a quote from Agnès Godard, the cinematographer of Beau Travail (1999): “The most inexhaustible landscapes for me…

“Rip It Up and Start Again:” Scream 4 and Post-? »

By Will Dodson. Wes Craven’s Scream 4 is in many ways a fitting capstone to the 9/11 decade, thus the title of this essay, “Rip it up and…

Looking with Julia’s Eyes: Gender, Spectatorship, and Contemporary Spanish Horror Cinema »

By Ian Olney. Over the past decade or so, the Spanish horror film has undergone a striking renaissance. During the final years of the Franco regime, in the…

Festival Reports

The 20th Annual Austin Film Festival »

By Jacob Mertens. At some point during the madness of Halloween—in which flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz gave pedicab rides, No-Face from Spirited Away handed out candy to strangers, and Sleeping Beauty…

By Gary M. Kramer. At this year’s AFI Fest, a quartet of international narrative features depicted the realism of everyday life, as various characters struggled with drama big and small. However, one film…

By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale 2013 is, as always, a feast of well designed program and an audience-friendly film festival, with events, talks, DJ-set and parties welcome to all audiences. There are well-acclaimed festival…

By Davide Caputo. After a five-year absence, this year I returned to the Zurich Film Festival to find that the predictions I made regarding its potential in my previous review for FilmInt (6.1,…

Interview

Peter MacDonald: The Man Who Failed to Change Rambo »

By David A. Ellis. Peter MacDonald was born in London in 1939 and first worked with film for…

By Gary M. Kramer. Agnès Varda was the guest artistic director at the AFI Festival this year. She screened…

By Gary M. Kramer. Bernardo Bertolucci presented a 3-D version of his Oscar-winning film, The Last Emperor (1987), at the 2013…

David A. Ellis talked to the 97-year-old about his work on Moulin Rouge (1952), directed by John Huston, who…

By Cleaver Patterson. This summer the groundbreaking horror film Frankenstien’s Army took Film4 FrightFest by storm, and is now…

By Tom Ue. Alan Brown’s first film, O Beautiful, won the Future Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Palm Springs…

By Cleaver Patterson. Alan Jones is something of a legend within the world of fantasy and horror film journalism.…

Matthew Sorrento: Thank you so much, Wheeler — it was a delight to finally see the film after reading about it...
Wheeler Winston Dixon: Matthew, this is an excellent piece on a great and underrated film. Many observers at the time...
Matthew Sorrento: Interesting point about the chance for redemption in Ophüls’ take on noir. In Ray’s...
Wheeler Winston Dixon: UPDATE: Pip Chodorov wrote me with this news on the availability of Marcel Hanoun’s...
DAVID A ELLIS: Great interview Wheeler.

Review

Anikó Imre’s A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (2012) »

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. The increasing visibility of Eastern European films—those of the Romanian New Wave, especially—in the United States has brought with it a corresponding rise in…

Seconds: the “Lost” Frankenheimer Returns »

By Matthew Sorrento. Prominent for years on American television, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds had disappeared by the advent of DVD and remained unavailable until the recent Criterion release. With a generation unfamiliar with…

3:10 to Yuma (1957) »

By Jacob Mertens. In film, there is often a feeling of moral certainty. A protagonist has a line drawn for him by cultural expectations and he knows not to cross…

Stranger by the Lake (2013) »

By Mark James. Call it Le Cruising. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie stages a stripped-down rendition of William Friedkin’s 1980 gay serial killer thriller, set by a lake in the French…

Colossal Youth (2006) »

By Oana Chivoiu. Pedro Costa’s landmark is an aesthetic of austerity that resonates with the thematic content in his features dealing with poverty, slum life, and radical limitations. Colossal Youth…

Whitewash: An Austin Film Festival Review »

By Jacob Mertens. Left buried in the formidable winter of Northern Quebec, Bruce (Thomas Haden Church) dwells in the cramped cabin of a snow plow. He drinks melted ice and…

Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (2013) »

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. In recent years, theology has taken a growing interest in cinema, viewing it as both an effective exegetic tool and an intriguing cultural form…

Big Sur: An Austin Film Festival Review »

By Jacob Mertens. How tempting it would be to open this review with some Kerouac quote, a burst of frayed genius from his late stage novel Big Sur to set…

La Notte (1961) »

By William Repass. “Whenever I try to communicate, love disappears.” When finally—after what seems like an ice age of anticipation—you receive your package in the mail, strip away the bubble-wrap…

Not so Innocent: The lasting influence of a ghostly classic! »

By Cleaver Patterson. As the dark nights draw in and Christmas approaches, what better than to settle down and enjoy a good, old fashioned ghost story. It seems appropriate then…

Inside Llewyn Davis: An Austin Film Festival Review »

By Jacob Mertens. The folk singer sits at the fore of a small crowd in the Gaslight Cafe. The lights hang dim around him, pale concrete at his feet—more a…

Captain Phillips (2013) »

By Jacob Mertens. A few months ago I was listening to NPR’s This American Life podcast, and I caught an episode that was devoted entirely to a hostage situation in…

By Christopher Sharrett. This overly promoted film had little to recommend it to me, certainly not the presence of Ridley Scott, whose…

Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Theodor W. Adorno, one of the most recognized members of the Frankfurt School, is a figure seldom mentioned…

By Perle Petit. Miguel Gomes’ third feature film takes its name from F. W. Murnau’s 1931 Polynesian epic Tabu, a Story of the…

Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Historically, the skillful manipulation of light and shadow has contributed to the distinctiveness of a number of…

By Janine Gericke. Conspirators is the third film in Oxide Pang’s Detective trilogy, beginning with The Detective (2007) and The Detective 2…

By Christopher Sharrett. The advertisements for this film by Alexandre Moors contain the blurb “based on the true story of the DC…

By Janine Gericke. I was surprised to learn that A Complicated Story was made as a student film by first-time filmmaker Kiwi Chow,…

By William Repass. “I know that I look like Hitler, and I’m gonna prove it right now!” Since any discussion of German-American…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I’m always in a bad mood after I see a bad movie, especially when I have hopes that…

A Book Review by Budd Wilkins. ‘In his essay on “Screen Memories,” [Freud] argued that troubling or traumatic memories tend to find…

By Mark James. You can tell that Yann Gonzalez’s film, You and the Night (Rencontres d’après minuit, better translated as Encounters after…

By Jacob Mertens. Moral relativism can make for a lousy film. Characters bark and growl about their actions being justified, the narrative…

Book Review by Jez Owen. This collection from academic imprint Anthem Press collates material written by the eminent University of Boulder resident…

By William Repass. “Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for who we come to be.…

By Matthew Sorrento. While viewing the new 3D IMAX version of The Wizard of Oz, I didn’t notice anything different in the…

By Cleaver Patterson. Watching the work of German animator Lotte Reiniger, one thing is clear above all else: the magical shadow plays,…

By Luke Buckle. The Dardenne brothers return with another realist-documentary style film, this time depicting eleven year old protagonist Cyril (Thomas Doret)…

By John A. Riley. Keisuke Kinoshita’s colorful elegy The Ballad of Narayama deals with ubasute, the apparently apocryphal Japanese practice of abandoning…

By Moira Sullivan. The award at the 70th Venice Film Festival called the “Special Orizzonti Award for Innovative Content” went to Shahram…

By Moira Sullivan. Eastern Boys, directed by Robin Campillo, won best film in the 70th Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. The film offers a…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Hannah Fidell’s debut feature A Teacher has been getting something of a critical drubbing in the media since…

By Brandon Konecny. As a child of the nineties, I narrowly evaded much of the cultural sterility of the preceding decade. Sure,…

By Cleaver Patterson. Some films have, since their first release, entered into the realms of mythical cinema. Whether due to their technical…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Slavoj Žižek is by far one of the most prominent intellectuals active today, gaining much of…

By Jacob Mertens. In film, there are any number of ways the world can end: zombies wreak havoc across the globe, colossal…

By Cleaver Patterson. There will always be drawbacks for any actor appearing in a film alongside Jennifer Aniston, the main one being…

By Matthew Sorrento. Morgan Spurlock is one of very few documentarians who seem to find constant work. (Others include Alex Gibney, who…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Woody Allen’s latest, Blue Jasmine, has received mixed reviews from the daily critics, who don’t seem to know…

By Mark James. The Go Doc Project, a new collaboration between writer/director Cory Krueckeberg and lead Tanner Cohen (they worked together previously…

By Brandon Konecny. The adaptation of a novel to film is a difficult undertaking. Our judgment of a novel’s cinematic counterpart is,…

By Steven Harrison Gibbs. I should begin by stating that I do not regularly indulge in assessing the average narrative film with…

Andy’s Gang, or Saturday Morning of the Living Dead »

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “There was a character that hung out in a clock called Froggy, the Magic Gremlin, and they used…

By Christopher Sharrett. It amazes me that so few reviewers noted emphatically that Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012), like his earlier…

By Kelly Burt. The film Where the Wild Things Are (2009), based on the 1963 children’s book of the same name by…

By Devapriya Sanyal. The two great wars of the twentieth century would change everything for humankind once and for all; both materially…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Betty White has always been ahead of her time. This has been both a blessing and a curse.…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “Anyone can make a $100 million dollar movie, but to shoot a feature film in 12-14 days, with…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact…

By Christopher Sharrett. I hesitated as I began this essay, chiefly because I came across some interviews with Derek Cianfrance, whose work…

By Anthony Killick. Film festivals have always operated as nodes in a network of global power relations. Set within this field of…

By Christopher Sharrett. While writing an essay on the post-Vietnam film Rolling Thunder, I thought of William Wyler’s much-applauded 1946 film The…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “I said no to Hollywood. There you have no freedom to create.” (Bielinsky to Federico Fahsbender)…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality Watch new blood on…

By Celluloid Liberation Front “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” (D.W.…

By Hampus Hagman. In Iron Man 2 (2010), Tony Stark discovers that his deceased father has left behind coded sketches for a…

By Christopher Sharrett. I write this comment on Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty more out of a sense of moral obligation and…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “Targets are people…and you could be one of them!” (Tagline for Targets) Peter Bogdanovich got his start as…

By Christopher Sharrett. I recently happened upon a very good Studio Canal DVD of the John Flynn/Paul Schrader film Rolling Thunder (1977).…

By Sarah Myles. The perfect double bill is an elusive, mythical thing. A single entertainment event comprised of two unique artistic expressions.…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” (Print ad for Bushmaster Firearms) I write this as I watch in sadness,…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Dedicated to the memory of Rick Lopez. The films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are usually…

By Anna Carius. It seems that the Mayans got it wrong. The end of the human civilization, portrayed with such gusto by…

By Diarmuid Corkery. Well before Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit was released, it had already caused controversy among tentative fans…

By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. Media history often seems to be understood as a (d)evolutionary succession of discrete units – one medium devouring the…

By Marcin Radomski. In the history of cinema we can find several unforgettable periods and schools which rise to the surface, are…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “All I want to do is make a million dollars.” (Jack Webb, 1953 [as qtd. in Hayde 2001:…

By Christopher Sharrett. This is an attempt at a brief revaluation of Roger Corman’s cycle of adaptations of the work of Edgar…

By Francis DiClemente. Last summer, in the midst of the blockbuster movie season dominated by sequels, 3-D animation and superhero offerings, I…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “This is the end My only friend, the end Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This is the fourth and final part of “Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s.” Follow these links…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Recently my dull life seems to have no meaning I am stuck with someone We’re not communicating I…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This is the third article in a 4-part series. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This is the second article in a 4-part series. You can read Part 1 here. With sick comedy…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “If civilization goes down, that Would be an event to contemplate.” (Robinson Jeffers, “May-June, 1940”) Human-centered popular folktales…