Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

Hollywood Nomad: Andrew Dominik’s Aussiewood »

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

Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point »

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

The Narcissistic Sociopathology of Gender: Craig’s Wife and The Hitch-Hiker, Part 1 »

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

Preliminary Notes on the Monochrome Universe »

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Lately I’ve been thinking about black and white movies, and how they’ve almost completely disappeared from the current cinematic landscape.[1] There are occasional projects…

“Illusion and Reality” Films: Genre and Apotheosis »

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

From Gangster to Master: the Forgotten Edward G. Robinson »

By Matthew Sorrento. I. The Look Robinson’s legion of fans grew after the actor delivered an intense desperation as Rico Bandello in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931). A…

Rocky Balboa and the Politics of Urban Renewal »

By Jon Kraszewski. Coming at the end of a film series that had degenerated into useless portraits of cartoonish characters and simplified visions of social issues, the 2006…

The Mother’s Role in Bergman’s Persona »

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

True Love, Pride, and Passion: Re-viewing Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) »

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

One-Location Films and How They Achieve Their Success »

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

Our Children, or the Importance of Medea »

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 in mind of Catherine Corsini’s Leaving…

Festival Reports

November Film Festivals in Berlin: Afrikamera, Interfilm, and Around the World in 14 Films »

By Yun-Hua Chen. November in Berlin is a busy month for film buffs in the capital, as there are three major independent film festivals: Afrikamera, Interfilm, and Around the World in 14 Films.…

By Brandon Konecny and Jacob Mertens. Tucked away on the coast of North Carolina, there is a festival dedicated to the weirdly beautiful, the perversely provocative—a lovingly programmed lineup, taking shape as an…

By Michael Miller. AFI Fest unspooled along Hollywood Boulevard November 7-14, 2013 to almost entirely full houses. The event permits a sizable number of free tickets available to the public via an online…

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…

Interview

America’s Acts of Killing: Robert Greenwald on Drone Wars »

By Matthew Sorrento. Bizarre, shocking, yet filled with truth, Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing continues to gather acclaim.…

By Anna Weinstein. Due to an error during printing one page of this interview was replaced by an ad when…

By Anna Weinstein. Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, described by Variety as “one of Latin America’s fastest-rising femme helmer-scribes,” has…

By Paul Risker. Author Henry James continues to find work posthumously, and last year directors Scott McGehee and David…

One of the boldest creative choices of the year came courtesy of director Jeremy Lovering, who took a bite…

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…

Will: Thank you for this essay on a film that’s always fascinated me. By chance, I got a copy of the 2004 DVD...
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: I have been watching uncomfortably as most critics tiptoe around this explosive film,...
Wheeler Winston Dixon: This is an excellent, thoughtful, superbly researched piece, and I was with you all the way...
Gwendolyn: Thanks Will. I hope you enjoy the second half on The Hitch-Hiker, coming soon to a laptop or another...
Will: This is a fascinating essay, though it makes me crazy not to have access to “Craig’s Wife.”...

Review

God’s Little Acre (1958) »

By Jeremy Carr. When he wasn’t genre hopping from Film Noir to Westerns to epic spectacles and war films, the perpetually underrated Anthony Mann was mixing conventions and mingling styles…

Gravity (2013) »

By Jacob Mertens. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) drifts in zero gravity, curled into a fetal pose with eyes closed, as if the decompression chamber was a womb. She has…

Les Cousins (1959) »

By Christopher Neilan. In 1958, twenty-seven year old cahiers du cinema critic Claude Chabrol spent his wife’s inheritance money shooting his debut feature Le beau Serge, a Hitchcock influenced morality…

Autumn Sonata (1978) »

By Jeremy Carr. “A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn…

Shackled (Belenggu): A Well-Mounted Disappointment »

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I wish I could say kinder things about this film, especially since it’s clear that this was a labor of love on the part of its…

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) »

By William Repass. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street begins with a simple equation: money is a drug. “Enough of this shit will make you invincible,” enthuses Jordan Belfort (Leonardo…

Hollywood Exiles in Europe »

A Book Review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Let’s just start by saying that this is an excellent book. I get stacks of new titles every day from publishers, and it…

American Hustle (2013) »

By Jacob Mertens. David O. Russell’s American Hustle begins with a title card stating “Some of this actually happened,” and for once a Hollywood film makes an honest claim to…

The Cinematic Palette from Feudal Japan – Gate of Hell »

By Giuseppe Sedia. Beyond any artistic value or aesthetic significance, the critical response to Gate of Hell (1953) provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of cinematic taste in the Fifties.…

The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945-89 (2011) »

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. A full historical account of Bulgaria’s cinema under Communism—given the topic’s obscurity and the lack of translated resources in the West, such a venture…

Kiss the Water (2013) »

By Cleaver Patterson. When someone is the subject matter of a film memoir, they must have a magical quality if they are never physically seen—either in person or in the…

Rififi (1955) »

By Jeremy Carr. The blacklist that shrouded the Hollywood community in suspicion, paranoia, and tragedy during the 1940s and ’50s, a steadily spreading outgrowth of the tactics formulated and executed…

By Bill Fech. David Lowery’s quiet western drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints came and went from theaters like a passing tumbleweed. The…

By Jacob Mertens. “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right,…

By Andrew J. Douglas. Anticipating an early effort by a respected filmmaker—let alone one known for work that is at once thoughtful,…

By Matthew Sorrento. The choice of writer-director JC Chandor to cast Robert Redford in All is Lost was astute, if not fortunate.…

By Axel Andersson. At first it looks like an ornate latticework, but there is no way to separate the scars from the…

By Danny King. For his first two stabs at directing, Ralph Fiennes has selected subject matter that seems typical of an actor-turned-director…

A book review by Liza Palmer. In 2004, I had the pleasure of reviewing the first edition of Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock…

By Cleaver Patterson. A book like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was always going to be too big in size and…

By Robert Kenneth Dator. Every single bit of visual stimulus that comes to the human brain via the visual cortex must be…

A Book Review by Jack Curtis Dubowsky. Henry Mancini—the iconic composer of ‘Moon River,’ ‘Peter Gunn,’ ‘Baby Elephant Walk,’ ‘The Pink Panther,’…

By Adam O’Brien. Like Roberto Rossellini, Ernst Lubitsch is a filmmaker whose greatness is both clear and very difficult to articulate. Penetrating…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. The increasing visibility of Eastern European films—those of the Romanian New Wave, especially—in the United States…

By Matthew Sorrento. Prominent for years on American television, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds had disappeared by the advent of DVD and remained unavailable…

By Jacob Mertens. In film, there is often a feeling of moral certainty. A protagonist has a line drawn for him by…

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

By Oana Chivoiu. Pedro Costa’s landmark is an aesthetic of austerity that resonates with the thematic content in his features dealing with…

By Jacob Mertens. Left buried in the formidable winter of Northern Quebec, Bruce (Thomas Haden Church) dwells in the cramped cabin of…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. In recent years, theology has taken a growing interest in cinema, viewing it as both an…

By Jacob Mertens. How tempting it would be to open this review with some Kerouac quote, a burst of frayed genius from…

By William Repass. “Whenever I try to communicate, love disappears.” When finally—after what seems like an ice age of anticipation—you receive your…

By Cleaver Patterson. As the dark nights draw in and Christmas approaches, what better than to settle down and enjoy a good,…

By Jacob Mertens. The folk singer sits at the fore of a small crowd in the Gaslight Cafe. The lights hang dim…

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

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…

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,…

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.…

By Jamie Isbell. Charles Burnett’s UCLA thesis feature Killer of Sheep (1977) has become something of a retrospective masterpiece. A cult artifact…

By Rossella Scalia. My first encounter with the director Elvira Notari occurred randomly, as almost always happens with important meetings. I…

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

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

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

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Alice Guy is a filmmaker whose body of work is still a site of contestation for modern critics;…

By Shashank Saurav. “Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it’s the way we can…

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…

The forced Real of (in)humanity: A brief Lacanian critique of The Act of Killing

By Mats Carlsson. Like all great documentaries, The
Editorial issue 66: The Bechdel Test and the Biases of Cinema

By Daniel Lindvall. Recently four Swedish cinemas, all
Call for Reviews – Winter 2013

By Jacob Mertens, Review Editor for Film International. Here
The Thalia: An Appreciation

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Does anyone remember The
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From the 3rd to the 9th of March
Commentary: Committed to Cypriot Cinema

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