Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

DocuChronicles: Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground »

DocuChronicles is a blog dedicated to independent documentary cinema by filmmaker Marjorie Sturm. It includes a mix of reviews, interviews, and longer pieces. By Marjorie Sturm. Barbara Rubin was an experimental…

Transcending the Chains of Illusion – The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s World of Tang China, Edited by Peng Hsiao-yen »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. In Mostly About Lindsay Anderson, his long-time friend Gavin Lambert speaks about the in-flight movie seen by his colleague that drove…

Researcher Beware! – Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra by Joseph McBride »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Joseph McBride’s latest mammoth book, well-written and copiously documented as usual, is an unusual production in the field of cinema studies.…

Reassessing Blue Velvet: a Criterion Collection Release »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have had a difficult history with David Lynch’s breakthrough film Blue Velvet (1986), and for that matter, much of the director’s work. At first,…

Pondering the Ponderous: Malick’s A Hidden Life (Cannes 2019) »

By Ali Moosavi. My relationship with Terence Malick films has been love and hate. Watching Badlands (1973) back in the 70s was like a breath of fresh air; a…

La vérité: the French Woman’s Prison (Criterion Collection) »

By Tony Williams. Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) is best known as the director of Le Corbeau (1943), Quai des Orfevres (1947), The Wages of Fear (1953), Diabolique (1955) for the…

Long Walk to Freedom: The Silence of Others »

By Michael Sandlin. Despite its low-budget workmanlike feel, this documentary from Emmy-winning directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar – and produced by Spanish directorial titan Pedro Almodovar –…

Planning and Execution: Werner Herzog’s Scenarios II and Meeting Gorbachev »

By John Duncan Talbird. Werner Herzog should win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If Bob Dylan can win it, I don’t see why a filmmaker can’t and it’s…

The Struggle for a City’s Soul: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Criterion Collection) »

By Jeremy Carr. Newly released from Tegal Prison, Franz Biberkopf cautiously looks over a custodial stretch of land just inside the wall that separates the penitentiary from the…

Never Look Away: Art Against Death »

By Christopher Sharrett. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away is a good – but not great – film of this past season that deserves recognition; I wanted…

I Made the Documentary The Cult of JT LeRoy, and I Must Discuss Savannah Knoop’s New Film »

By Marjorie Sturm. I am the director and producer of the The Cult of JT LeRoy, the documentary that explores the elaborate literary hoax perpetrated by Laura Albert…

Festival Reports

Coming of Age with Care: the 21st Maryland Film Festival (2019) »

By Gary M. Kramer. Now in its 21st year, the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore is a showcase for eclectic independent features, shorts, and documentaries. This year’s program features films both homegrown and far-flung.…

By Gary M. Kramer. The Tribeca Film Festival, April 24-May 5, offers a variety of features, shorts, documentaries, television and new media productions from new and established filmmakers. This year’s programs offered some…

By N. Buket Cengiz. Held only a couple of days after a social democrat mayor has won the elections in the city after long years, Istanbul Film Festival, organized by Istanbul Foundation for…

By Gary M. Kramer. At this year’s Miami International Film Festival, there are some interesting debuts, some intriguing slow-burn films, and some compelling documentaries. Here is a rundown of a half-dozen titles screening…

By Gary M. Kramer. The DC Independent Film Festival, unspooling March 1-10 in Washington, DC, is celebrating its 20th year in 2019. This year’s program features dozens of features and shorts, along with a…

By Gary M. Kramer. Now in its 25th year, the Slamdance Film Festival – held in Park City, Utah, January 25-31, 2019 – is a showcase for independent filmmakers. Here is a rundown of…

By Martin Kudláč. The largest annual Swiss film gathering, and one of the longest running film festivals in the world, in Locarno flourished into a sought-after cinephile event, some say even “the worldwide cinephile…

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin

By Gary M. Kramer. Two shorts programs at this year’s New York Film Festival feature new and exciting works by debut, established, and returning filmmakers. The International Shorts Program II opens with the…

Interview

“If You Don’t Learn from the Greats, You’d Be Stupid”: An Interview with Cinematographer Robin Vidgeon »

By David A. Ellis. Robin Vidgeon BSC born in August 1939 is a retired cinematographer. For many years he…

By N. Buket Cengiz. Ali Vatansever’s Saf (2018) was one of the outstanding films at the Human Rights in…

By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival had more than 5,100 submissions for its shorts programs.…

To celebrate the life of Larry Cohen (1936-2019), Film International will excerpt portions of Tony Williams’s interviews with the filmmaker from Larry…

By Yun-hua Chen. With a puzzle plotline that resembles Memento, Retrospekt focuses on two women, Mette and Lee Miller,…

By Tom Ue. Claus Räfle has directed over forty feature-length documentaries for German television. Die Heftmacher earned the Grimme…

By Elias Savada. The Kimpton Hotel Monaco is just 9 blocks east of the White House, the work place…

By Jake Rutkowski. The 1972 United California Bank robbery and the gang that pulled it off don’t occupy a lot…

By Yun-hua Chen. Agostino Ferrente, the director of Selfie, started this film project with the initial intention to document…

By Neila Driss. During the 40th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), which took place from November…

By Tom Ue. Vladimir de Fontenay’s Mobile Homes follows a young mother (Imogen Poots), her boyfriend (Callum Turner), and her eight-year-old…

Tony Williams: Thank you for publishing this interview. There may be hope for this “ugly society” if more...
Matthew Sorrento: Reading about this “misfit” cowboy narrator, I can’t help wonder if the Coens...
Matthew Sorrento: This sounds like an interesting mediation on the politics of gender and, more specifically, our...
Melinda: Great interview, John! I enjoyed the specificity of your questions as well as the conversational style of...
Matthew Sorrento: I agree with Tony, Daniel — thanks for commenting on the issues this film addresses. This...

Review

Peace & Love, 50 Years On – Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation »

By Elias Savada. Fifty years ago (gulp!) I never made it to Woodstock. I didn’t even try, although I had a hallucinogenic blast four years later at the 1973 Summer…

Giving by Stealing: Denys Arcand’s The Fall of the American Empire »

By Thomas Puhr. Denys Arcand’s The Fall of the American Empire (2018) asks a question that most never have the luxury to ponder: What does one do when they have…

Film as Cultural Artifact: Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution by Nadia Yaqub »

A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. What does it mean to “document” a displaced people? Do humanitarian films, while helpful in raising awareness, inherently depict a people as helpless victims?…

It’s a Hard Knock Life: American Woman »

By Elias Savada. Wanna watch a train wreck? Sienna Miller plays one in Jake Scott’s third feature. For the first half-hour of this blue-collar salute to misguided motherhood (and the…

A Device to Remember: Halston »

By Dana Weidman. Halston, the new documentary from director Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I) starts with a credit stating that the “following film is documentary. However, the narrator is a…

Kal-El Spelled Badly Is Brightburn »

By Elias Savada. Here’s a twist on one of those what if comic book, sci-fi scenarios. What if an alien baby (conveniently human in form) crashes to Earth and becomes…

The De Palma Basics: Domino »

By Ali Moosavi. I have been an ardent Brian De Palma fan ever since watching Phantom of the Paradise at the cinemas in 1974. That was 45 years ago; he…

“Brooksie” Revisited: Beggars of Life (1928) from Kino Lorber and Beggars of Life: A Companion to the 1928 Film by Thomas Gladysz »

A Film/Book Review by Tony Williams. While we eagerly await the Criterion release of The Sound of Music with audio-commentary by Quentin Tarantino, joking aside, it is pleasurable to see…

Scholar, Lawyer, Catcher, Spy: The Spy Behind Home Plate »

By Elias Savada. I can’t take credit for creating that tagline, but it is a perfect John Le Carré allusion. It’s from author Nicholas Dawidoff (who appears in this film), who…

Beyond the “Post-Western” – Marlina: A Murderer in Four Acts »

By Matthew Sorrento. Marlina begins with a scenario all too familiar: the title character, recently widowed, is now an object of desire (her body and fortune) for local men. One…

Pondering the Ponderous: Malick’s A Hidden Life (Cannes 2019) »

By Ali Moosavi. My relationship with Terence Malick films has been love and hate. Watching Badlands (1973) back in the 70s was like a breath of fresh air; a film that,…

Look and Listen: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Cannes 2019) »

By Ali Moosavi. Somehow I had not seen any of Celine Sciamma’s films until watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it was…

Screening Communities: Negotiating Narratives of Empire, Nation, and the Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema by Jing Jing Chang »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Hong Kong cinema studies has received detailed coverage over the decades in works written about specific periods and studios such as Shaw Bros and…

Was this film made just so Liam Neeson could star in the inevitable American remake?

Where Has the Film Gone?: My Son »

By Gary M. Kramer. My Son purports to be a taut thriller about a desperate father’s search for his missing seven-year-old son. However, while this efficient French film includes a…

A Traditional Period Piece: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Cannes 2019) »

By Ali Moosavi. Twenty-five years ago Pulp Fiction premiered at Cannes, won the Palm D’Or, and had an everlasting impact on the art of film making. Numerous films have been…

A Disquieting Tale: Unarmed Man »

By Elias Savada. Harold Jackson III is a very focused, and quite talented, individual. He does just about everything in Unarmed Man, his latest feature: executive producer, producer, director, writer, director…

Almodovar Most Personal: Pain and Glory (Cannes 2019) »

By Ali Moosavi. Pain and Glory is Pedro Almodovar at his most personal and confessional, in the same vein as Bad Education (2004). Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a writer-director…

Martial Art: Zhang Yimou’s Shadow »

By Jeremy Carr. Zhang Yimou has had a remarkable career, one distinguished by its approximate division into two distinct phases. There were first his mostly regional dramas, intimate, relatively moderate…

Dystopias in Disguise: Aniara »

By John Duncan Talbird. In 1956, Swedish author Harry Martinson wrote an epic poem called Aniara. It tells the story of the eponymous transportation ship which, on the way to Mars,…

Life During Wartime: Ingmar Bergman’s Shame (Criterion Collection) »

By Jeremy Carr. Save for the broad categories of drama or comedy, Ingmar Bergman isn’t a name often associated with genre filmmaking. His 1968 feature, Hour of the Wolf, could…

Universalizing a Movement – The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema »

A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. As its title of this collection makes clear, The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2018, edited…

By Matthew Fullerton. In a 1981 essay, the film critic Alan Booth (1946-1993) recognized independent directors as the strength of Japanese cinema.…

By Michael Sandlin. Despite its low-budget workmanlike feel, this documentary from Emmy-winning directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar – and produced by…

By Thomas Puhr. He is a slight man: short and hunched, as if perpetually carrying a heavy load. His head and eyes…

By Elias Savada. Never has a Penny Lane film been this funny. An academic-now-turned-full-professional-documentary-filmmaker, she has provided a window into the weird…

By Elias Savada. It has come to this, the emotional end of the Marvel Comic Universe as we know it. In our…

By Rod Lott. New on Blu-ray from Arrow Video, 1987’s Scared Stiff arrives with a stunningly inaccurate title – one that suggests a light…

By Elizabeth Toohey. Biopics, especially literary ones, tend to gravitate towards the grandiose. Sweeping vistas and luxurious estates command center stage as a…

By Michael Sandlin. Seeing populist political shyster Steve Bannon’s slow professional demise play out over the course of Alison Klayman’s documentary The…

By Rod Lott. Whereas several of Brian De Palma’s works famously suggested tools and utensils as phallic, Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart removes all doubt.…

By Yun-hua Chen. Action itself is not enough to compose a good action film – we see yet another hard-earned lesson in…

By Gary M. Kramer. Stockholm, written and directed by Robert Budreau, recounts the “absurd but true” 1973 Norrmalmstorg (Kreditbanken) robbery and hostage…

By Rod Lott. If the first two minutes of Riccardo Freda’s The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) had failed to…

By Jake Rutkowski. It’s hard to view the discourse around baseball’s most recent and protracted steroid use scandal as anything other than…

By Tony Williams. Like the recently restored Behind the Door (1919), Der Hund von Baskerville was shown at the San Francisco Silent…

A Book Review by Mads Larsen. The timing could hardly be better. Every month seems to throw more gasoline onto the political…

By Jeremy Carr. There is so much potential tragedy in the first twenty minutes of Diane that the film appears instantly in…

By Yun-hua Chen. Jia Zhangke’s latest, Ash is the Purest White, three years after his previous film Mountains May Depart (2015) which…

A Book Review by John Fawell. I’ve always been somewhat surprised by the amount of critical attention paid to Charlie Chaplin’s sound…

By Elias Savada. Larry Fessenden has plenty of fans. A versatile producer, director, writer, editor, cinematographer, and actor in dozens of low-budget flicks,…

By Rod Lott. Death aside, it’s a good time to be José Ramón Larraz. The Spanish director finally gets his due, a…

By Christopher Sharrett. Among the few films that impressed me last season was Paul Dano’s first film as director, Wildlife, based…

By Michael Sandlin. Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson, in his sophomore directorial effort Woman at War, imagines the chaos that ensues when a…

By Matthew Sorrento. The most unfortunate aspect of Jordan Peele’s Get Out was its creator’s attempt at self-criticism. Some months after the…

By Ali Moosavi. The media have been so preoccupied with whether or not Idris Elba will become the next James Bond that…

By Elias Savada. Packing a $153 million weekend wallop here in her home country, and a huge $455 million on her native planet,…

By Ali Moosavi. Films about drug trafficking in Central and South America have been on our cinema and TV screens almost continuously,…

By John Duncan Talbird. In the opening seconds of Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2014), we see a bird’s-eye view of Budapest, but…

By Mina Radovic. Robert Mapplethorpe is one of New York’s famous black-and-white photographers of the 1970s: coming out after the Warhol generation…

By Gary M. Kramer. Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella, has been released on DVD…

A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. At the very least, Adrian Martin’s Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. “It was not only his desire to play heroic roles that made him diet, but the…

A Book Review by Mads Larsen. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to burn, and although you have no experience,…

By Thomas Puhr. It’s only fitting that writer-director Tim Sutton’s latest, Donnybrook (2018), opens with a voyage by boat. Like Odysseus, Jarhead…

By Elias Savada. Another year and another Academy Awards show looms large, filled with commentary about snubs and surprises and a program, the…

By Janine Gericke. On Saturday, December 1st, the SF Silent Film Festival held its annual Day of Silents winter program at the…

By Christopher Sharrett. I don’t feel especially generous toward Peter Jackson’s “new” (hardly the right word) film, and must call it stunt…

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. It’s entirely possible you’ll come away from Peter Shelley’s biography of Gene Hackman knowing less…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. It is early evening watching on UK’s ITV channel, the only one of two that existed…

By Elias Savada. First, I thought this might be another horror film with oversized critters due to 1) atomic radiation run amuck, 2)…

By Janine Gericke. During the silent film era, some of the most prolific and highest earning producers, writers, and filmmakers were women.…

By Jeremy Carr. “You have to relax.” These words of advice come from Laia Costa’s Mona, near the beginning of Piercing, the…

By Ali Moosavi. To fans of Asghar Farhadi, Mani Haghighi may be known for co-writing the script of Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbeh Soori)…

By Brandon Konecny. In 2014, Moldova experienced what many observers called the “theft of the century.” One billion dollars disappeared from the…

By Elizabeth Toohey. R. Kelly; the backlash against Gillette; the abduction of 13-year-old Jayme Closs, held captive for three months; Larry Nassar’s abuse…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Yorkshire resident Derek Sculthorpe is an archivist who has also written plays, short stories, and articles…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Initiated last year with the appearance of monograph studies of Theatre of Blood and Martin, this…

By Arash Azizi. Hendi and Hormoz, which screened at the first-ever Iranian Film Festival of New York on January 11, has many…

By Jeremy Carr. The men of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek exist in a world of violence. It can be a basic…

By Noah Charney. Slovenian documentary films are at their best when they do not appear to be documentaries. When we imagine documentaries,…

By Tony Williams. These DVD restorations represent another important collaborative venture on the part of The Mary Pickford Foundation and Flicker Alley,…

Larry Cohen, 1936-2019 »

By Christopher Sharrett. Death is ruthless, but it seems to have been especially vicious lately. We have received word that Larry Cohen,…

By Matthew Sorrento. The most unfortunate aspect of Jordan Peele’s Get Out was its creator’s attempt at self-criticism. Some months after the…

By Tony Williams. “Anybody who does things their own way while they’re working with a corporation is going to be problematic.” –…

By James Slaymaker. Like many late-period Eastwood films, The Mule is a revisionist genre piece with a pronounced self-reflexive streak. It only…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Enter George Raft groom cum chauffeur – He lurked hand and collar and hands in…

By Tony Williams. After reviewing the disappointing Criterion Von Sternberg/Dietrich DVD Collection and noting the company’s inexplicable emphasis on popular films available…

By Brandon Konecny. In 2014, Moldova experienced what many observers called the “theft of the century.” One billion dollars disappeared from the…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have just recently seen Damien Chazelle’s First Man after putting it off during its initial release. The film…

By John Duncan Talbird. My friends and I loved the Talking Heads when we were in college. You could not go a week…

By Jeremy Carr. In her essay for the Criterion Collection release of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Moira Weigel opens with a…

By Tony Williams. De Palma’s Sisters has long been overdue for a new 4K digital restoration that Criterion now supplies along with…

By Christopher Sharrett. Some months ago I published in this location brief remarks on Pablo Larraín’s remarkable film Jackie (2016), one of…

By Tony Williams. Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) is admittedly one of the best screwball comedies of the 1930s that…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Joseph McBride, currently Professor of Film Studies at San Francisco State University, has had a…

By Elizabeth Toohey. If ever a movie was ripe for release, it’s the new bio-pic Colette. The life and career of one…

By Tony Williams. Imagine Lee J. Cobb (1911-1976) playing a star role as an honest cop turned bad played for a sucker…

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. The multi-authored book is a misnomer. Although out in the world there is no…

By Tony Williams. A box set containing the Josef Von Sternberg (1894-1969) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) collaboration, even if copyright reasons exclude…

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Genre studies, whether treating film genre history as evolutionary or as cycles, always has to…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Any book or article by Joseph McBride is worth reading, especially in this era of…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. I initially saw this 2010 book as a main feature on this company’s web site and requested…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Deliberately described as a “provocative film scholar,” this prolific, self-educated expert in film, who has…

By Tony Williams. For those really interested in the art of cinema, the achievements of King Hu (1932-1997) are comparable to others…

By John W. Fawell. The following is an excerpt from Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg: the Art of Classic Hollywood,…

By Declan Cochran. Introduction (Pre-Match Warm-Up) Cinematically speaking, the filmed football match is a curious phenomenon, one that seems to integrate a…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about Andrei Tarkovsky, about whom I’ve been…

By Johannes Schönherr. Kim Jong Il, the son of North Korea’s founder and Great Leader Kim Il Sung, went early in his…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. When recovering from reviewing lesser works by well-established publishers, whether direct-to-library or university presses, it…

By Elizabeth Toohey. Do we really need another Stanley Kubrick documentary? There’s the comprehensive Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001), with…

By Richmond B. Adams. During “The Reaping” sequence from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) “volunteer[s] as tribute” to…

By Elizabeth Toohey. Towards the end of the powerful new documentary RBG, we follow the 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg into…

By Tony Williams. I saw my first episode of The Outer Limits on a regional independent television station in the mid-60s. Opening…

By Matthew Fullerton. As Hollywood grapples with diversity issues, it is interesting to note how Tunisia, an emergent democracy since its 2011…

By Jeremy Carr. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was particularly adept at transitioning between the cinema and television (and theater, for that matter), starting the…

By David Greven. An exchange I had with an older, straight, white academic in Film Studies serves as an instructive example of…

By Christopher Weedman. Among the most impressive film restorations of 2017 was Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy (1931-36), which I reviewed last March…

A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. Alexia Kannas’ Deep Red (Columbia University Press, 2017), her contribution to the Wallflower Press Cultographies series,…