By Martin Kudláč. The descendants of Plato and Aristotle have done it again. Despite the mass of negative press focussed on the country’s ongoing financial crisis, Greek filmmakers have succeeded in attracting a good deal of attention. This rising modern generation of auteurs has proven to have all the necessary qualities to enhance world cinema. [...]
By Robert Kenneth Dator. ‘#1 Film Documentation!’ Anyone in the business has been here before. “Here” is The Twilight Zone of the runaway production. This is the one where any number of joint producers call the shots without talking to each other and never such incidental types as director and crew. Variations on the theme [...]
By Jacob Mertens. Could you survive a Christmas holiday season without any products made in China? As far as opening conceits go, Xmas Without China offers its audience a compelling quandary. Following this premise, one might imagine a film that lives up to the honored tradition of documentary satire, in which a personal story is [...]
By Jacob Mertens. A shirtless child in a cape streaks across the lawn chased by several twenty-something supervisors. They catch hold of the child before he crosses property lines, holding his arms and legs down, letting him calm until he can return to his room under his own power. Shortly thereafter he does, and an [...]
By Robert Kenneth Dator. “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Among the last quips of genius from the lips of Oscar Wilde, truer words than these were never spoken. With his absolute dying breath he is supposed to have said: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has [...]
By Jacob Mertens. Five friends camp out in a cabin, helping one of their own detox from drugs, only to find foul murder indelicately staged in the basement. Skinned cats hang from the ceiling, blood trails across the floor, and a pile of cinder speaks to some terrible crime committed. Of course, any normal group [...]
By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. For his first film since 2007’s Redacted, Brian De Palma returns to his Hitchcockian obsession, this time by way of Alain Corneau. A loose remake of Corneau’s final film, Love Crime (Crime d’amour, 2010), Passion feels very much like a De Palma flick from the ‘80s, with somewhat of a 21st-century bend. [...]
By Anthony Killick. The success of the 2012 Bristol Radical Film Festival proved how the demand for socially and politically engaged film hasn’t dwindled, despite attempts by those in power to abstract politics away from the day-to-day lives of the public. The festival showed how film is one of the most powerful tools for education [...]
By Gary M. Kramer. Writer/director Russell Brown makes short, sharp films that investigate how and why friends treat each other badly. His enjoyable feature debut Race You to the Bottom (2005) had two BFFs taking a tour through wine country and cutting each other down over the course of their travels. His sophomore effort, The [...]
By Yun-hua Chen. Against a backdrop of the Berlinale bear, the film festival opens with Wang Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster (2012), the five-year’s lavish-looking work of the president of the international jury. During the ten-day celebration of cinema, the city was honoured by the glamorous presence of international stars every night, among them three divas [...]