By Patrick McGilligan. Walter Hill’s first produced script was in 1972, but his films are a throwback to the Golden Age and to storytelling traditions that seem increasingly endangered in today’s Hollywood. He brings a modern swagger to old-fashioned genres. He relishes stories that center on male heroics, with cinematic […]
Babak Najafi: Learning to See Sweden – in Teheran
By Daniel Lindvall. Babak Najafi was born in Teheran in 1975 and came to Sweden as a boy in the mid-1980s. He went to film school (1998–2002), specializing in documentary film-making, and then made a series of well-received short films, mostly documentary, gaining him a ‘Bo Widerberg grant’ in 2004. […]
You Don’t Know What Love Is
By Daniel Garrett. The book Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is amazing: detailed, observant, naturalistic and smart, it is a story about men and land and love and society – in Wyoming, a state of mountains and valleys, greenlands and deserts. Annie Proulx’s language is mostly spare, though a […]
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile, 2007)
By Steven Yates. One of the most surprising successes of 2007 was Cristian Mingiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile). A film set in the Ceausescu period and detailing the events prior to an illegal abortion in a hotel may not have […]