Editorial issue 72: Diversity in U.S. Cinema

By Daniel Lindvall. At the time of writing [20 August 2015] the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has just published what is described as ‘the most comprehensive analysis of diversity in recent popular films ever conducted’, focusing on ‘data assessing gender, race/ethnicity and LGBT status […]

Yes, but it’s not cinema

By James Knight. It’s been thirty-two years since Wim Wenders shot Room 666 in a hotel room at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. What concerned Wenders at the time was the future state of cinema, and primarily, cinema’s relationship with television. The film featured several well-known directors alone in a […]

The Films of Jim Krell

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. One of the most original and iconoclastic personalities of the New American Cinema, Jim Krell created work that is simultaneously so important, and yet so unknown, that the news that his complete works are now being archived by Anthology Film Archives constitutes a major event, closing […]

Editorial issue 66: The Bechdel Test and the Biases of Cinema

By Daniel Lindvall. Recently four Swedish cinemas, all run by Folkets Hus och Parker (‘The People’s Houses and Parks’, an organization with roots in the labour movement), decided to start rating the gender balance of their films according to the so-called Bechdel test. The test, named after the American cartoonist […]

The Thalia: An Appreciation

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Does anyone remember The Thalia, located at 95th and Broadway, one of Manhattan’s greatest revival houses? I pretty much grew up there. It opened in 1931, and closed in the mid 1980s. The still above is from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977); I’d use another still […]

Bristol Radical Film Festival 2014

From the 3rd to the 9th of March 2014 the Bristol Radical Film Festival returns with another packed programme of overtly political documentary and fiction film from around the world. From historical classics to contemporary video-activism, short films and feature productions, we show the films that the multiplexes won’t, in […]

Richard C. Sarafian (1930-2013)

By Michael T. Toole. Richard C. Sarafian, the versatile Armenian-American director/actor whose most celebrated film, the exhilaratingly existential chase drama, Vanishing Point, is still one of the most actively discussed road films today, died on September 18, 2013 of pneumonia in Los Angeles. He was 83. Richard Caspar Sarafian was […]