Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Peckinpah the Dramatist »

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

Multicultural Middle-earth: Constructing “Home” and the Post-colonial Imaginary in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings »

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

Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema »

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

The Trouble With Hitchcock »

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

Female Sexual Pleasure Unpunished in Bright Days Ahead »

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

christian-bales-out-of-the-furnace-bombsheres-your-box-office-roundup

Out of the Furnace: The Question of Adversarial Cinema »

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

Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 3 »

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

Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 2 »

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

Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 1 »

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

Surviving the Monster Mom: Child’s Pose »

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “I hope it’s like a mirror.” (Călin Peter Netzer on Child’s Pose) “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not…

The Narcissistic Sociopathology of Gender: Craig’s Wife and The Hitch-Hiker, Part 2 »

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

Festival Reports

The Art House Convergence Regional Seminar 2014 »

By Mark James. It’s fitting that “Art House Convergence” spells it with two separate words. Without the specificity that the term “Arthouse” commands in the film world, “Art House” can enjoy a far…

By Gary M. Kramer. For the second year, AFI Docs showcased non-fiction shorts and features at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD, and at various Washington, D.C. venues. The festival was…

Ever wonder how film festivals come together? Noah Charney, Selector of Feature Films for the first annual Bled Film Festival, provides an inside look. Six weeks, thirty-five films, eight slots to fill. I…

By Sam Littman. Festival Overview Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city in Romania with approximately 350,00 inhabitants and home of the Transylvania International Film Festival, aspires to become the Youth Capital of Europe by…

By Mark James. The San Francisco International Film Festival, which ran April 24 through May 8th of this year, is true to its name in that its greatest strength has always been its…

Interview

The Corman Legacy Continues: An Interview with Evelyn Maude Purcell »

By Anna Weinstein. Heatstroke, starring Stephen Dorff, Svetlana Metkina, and Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones), tells the story of…

By Paul Risker. Every art form has a story, and recalling Mark Cousins’ description of film being a grass…

By Anna Weinstein. Nikki Braendlin’s film As High as the Sky tells the story of Margaret, a woman struggling…

By Paul Risker. From B-picture phenomenon Sharknado (2013), an abducted daughter in the revenge thriller Rage (2014), a rendezvous…

By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the tales of cinematic greats meeting, it ranks as one of the best: in 1997,…

By Tom Ue. Award-winning filmmaker Hanna Maria Heidrich brings imaginative imagery to life with human impulses and tightly-structured narratives.…

By Tom Ue. On the night of an astronomical anomaly, eight friends at a dinner party experience what becomes…

By Paul Risker. There are those films that offer a visceral experience – an explosion of sound, image and…

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: In some cases, being more educational than cinematic seems to me to be perfectly acceptable....
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Few bother to tackle the complex postcolonial ideologies underpinning LOTR much less the...
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Lili Taylor? I’m in. Sounds like a good small work. One of those films that passes...
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: I second that emotion! What an awful film. A dangerous film. It is full of wrong-headed...
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: I am really curious about this film as some reviewers have evoked the name of Luis Buñuel in...

Review

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) »

By Jeremy Carr. Even if we weren’t told at the start that Picnic at Hanging Rock was about a group of girls who disappeared Saturday, Feb. 14, 1900 and were…

Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013) »

By Jude Warne. In his 1854 book Walden, Henry David Thoreau sets forth a crucial instruction: “Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” This, perhaps, is the overarching message…

Forsaken Son: Richie Mehta’s Siddharth »

By Paul Risker. If film is a visual medium, then Richie Mehta’s Siddharth (2013) places as much emphasis on what is seen as not seen. “Siddharth” is a quest; a…

Borgman (2013) »

By James Teitelbaum. The pivotal moment in Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman comes at the end of the first act, when the titular Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) strides into a forest…

The Epic of Everest: Closing the Gap Between Man and the Impossibly Distant »

By Axel Andersson. An epic of Everest? The heroics of nature? John Noel’s remarkable 1924 documentary, expertly restored by the BFI with a new evocative score by Simon Fisher Turner,…

The Past As It Is: Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush »

By Paul Risker. Agnieszka Holland’s three part mini-series Burning Bush (2013) opens with a pictorial and musical energy that swings like a pendulum between freedom and oppression. Just as day…

The Cold Lands, Cold Indeed »

By Robert Kenneth Dator. In The Cold Lands prepare for inspired photography by Wyatt Garfield within which images old-growth forests appear like cathedrals; fields of golden rod and sage seem…

The Art of the Steal: Joyous, Clever, and Fun »

By Noah Charney. The first compliment I will pay to the new art heist movie, The Art of the Steal (2013), written and directed by Jonathan Sobol, is that it…

Cutting Room Cleanup: Junger’s Korengal »

By Paul Risker. The war on terror has received ample coverage on news and media outlets. But in an age when we are questioning or are being encouraged to question our…

Sorcerer (1977) »

By William Repass. “You think they pay you to drive? They pay you to be terrified. That’s your division of labor.” -The Wages of Fear (1953) Let’s not overlook the attendant…

Finding Fault with The Fault In Our Stars »

By Jacob Mertens. A month or so back, Slate posted an article in anticipation of Josh Boone’s film The Fault In Our Stars¹—based on John Green’s popular Young Adult book…

Life As He Saw It »

By Paul Risker. There is the frequently re-iterated question of what is the value of a life. The cinematic equivalent is the time given to telling a person’s life story. When…

Seeing Your Doppelganger Can Only Spell Trouble: Enemy (2013) »

By Janine Gericke. Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy opens with a quote from José Saramago’s novel The Double, which Enemy is loosely based on, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” Well, that peaked…

By Sam Littman. Not one element of Astrid Schau-Larsen’s documentary The Good Neighbour is superfluous. For this and many tangential reasons alone it is…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Let all metalheads throw up their devilhorns in celebration—Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s blood-soaked, guitar-churning anthology Heavy Metal…

By James Knight. Joint recipient of the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D.…

By Robert Kenneth Dator. The upshot of what some teens would call a relationship in a world of cyberslaves sees rachel_angel83 (Jaime…

By Cleaver Patterson. Film documentaries are the cinematic equivalent of a written biography. As a result, it follows that those which include…

By Gary M. Kramer. One of the highlights of Awesomefest’s summer line up is the free July 3 screening of the irresistible documentary,…

By Jeremy Carr. This year marks the 70th anniversary of one of the greatest film noir ever made, perhaps the quintessential title…

By David Sterritt. Hans Detlef Sierck left Germany in 1937, arrived in the United States four years later, Americanized his name to…

By William Repass. Wind and mist over hills that turn out to be ruins. A funereal sutra chanted over the soundtrack. Beside a…

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Indie directors love to mix genres in order to introduce us to fairly realistic characters, unusual stories and…

By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the entries in NPR’s 2013 series “Movies I’ve Seen a Million Times,” Jesse Eisenberg’s is the most…

By Giuseppe Sedia. To certain a degree Bullet Ballet (1998) represents a dividing line in Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cinematic career that shifted once…

By Christopher Sharrett. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster offers on this site a larger account of Călin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose than what follows…

By Matthew Sorrento. Here at Film International, we’re honored to have the hardest working man in film culture as a regular contributor.…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. It’s a shame that Oskar Fischinger hasn’t found his way into more literature on avant-garde cinema.…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godzilla is a simple creature. A relic from the prehistoric era, brought to life by atomic testing, Godzilla…

By Gary M. Kramer. It has been nearly a decade since Wolf Creek (2005) provided a cautionary tale about backpacking through the…

By Sebastian Clare. To cinephiles and avid video-gamers alike, the name ‘Uwe Boll’ is synonymous with the very worst of what today’s…

By Jacob Mertens. Revolution used to be a tangible part of our history. Not just stories of Malcolm X riling up a…

By Robert Kenneth Dator. Great Australian films are not so hard to come by. Finding great Australian films that Australians think are…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Matthew McConaughey is an excellent actor, and Lord knows he’s working enough these days, and he brings real…

By Jude Warne. On May 16th 1929, in Hollywood’s Hotel Roosevelt, it was announced that William Wellman’s film Wings had won the…

A Book Review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Literally hundreds of film books cross my desk every year; I review books on every…

By Christopher Sharrett. Don Siegel has long been known as one of the “Hollywood professionals,” a group of second-string directors whose work…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Todd McGowan may well be the finest film theorist currently working in the States. His work…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Under The Skin (2013) is being sold on the basis of a simple premise, which is true on…

By Daniel Lindvall. The year is 1918 and we are somewhere on the Japanese countryside. Jiro is a young boy obsessed with…

By Jeremy Carr. As with much of his work, especially in the last 15 years or so, one’s response to Brian De…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Oculus is a rather pretentious title for a rather straightforward movie, but despite the assembly line nature of…

By Jacob Mertens. The Raid 2 opens with a wide shot of a man kneeling beside a freshly dug grave. Facing his…

By Daniel Lindvall. “Do you know why I eat only roots? Because roots are important,” explains a 104-year-old nun to the greying…

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…

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.…

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.…

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Peckinpah the Dramatist »

By Christopher Sharrett. The label “master of violence” was long ago affixed to director Sam Peckinpah. Books on Peckinpah with titles like “Bloody Sam,” and studies comparing the director’s films…

Multicultural Middle-earth: Constructing “Home” and the Post-colonial Imaginary in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings »

By Laura Crossley. “The nation of course is not a desiring person but a fictive unity imposed on an aggregate of individuals, yet national histories are presented as if they…