Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

On Mutants, Monsters and Mushroom Clouds – Apocalypse Then: American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951-1967 by Mike Bogue »

A Book Review by Matthew Fullerton. Apocalypse Then (McFarland, 2017) is an informative and entertaining examination, and comparison, of science fiction films from the U.S. and Japan with both…

Dachra: A Different Kind of Tunisian Revolution »

By Greg Burris. Early on in the Tunisian horror film Dachra (Abdelhamid Bouchnak, 2018), we see a class of university students as they listen to their professor’s instructions…

A Complete Man of the World – Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France by Joseph Harriss »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Usually, I’m hesitant when presented with another biography for review. Despite the dedication and research involved, there often occurs a fundamental…

A Subjective and Concise Triumph – The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media and the Radical Imagination by Greg Burris »

A Book Review Essay by Ali Moosavi. There is an old adage that oppression and suppression fuels creativity. In the world of cinema, this is best exemplified in…

An Invigorating Romp: Murray Pomerance’s A Dream of Hitchcock »

A Book Review by John W. Fawell. The title of Murray Pomerance’s latest book on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY Press, 2018), refers…

Coming of Age, in Detail: Third Wife »

By Janine Gericke. There is a significant amount of symbolism throughout Ash Mayfair’s feature debut The Third Wife. The director and cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj juxtapose the nuances of…

The Journey, Not the Destination: Godard x 3 from Kino Lorber »

By Jeremy Carr. After concluding what was ostensibly his second phase of filmmaking – if one accepts the admittedly blurred lines that divide a comparatively commercial feature like Weekend (1967)…

The Truth Lies….: Cold Case Hammarskjöld »

By Michael Sandlin. It’s now been eight years since Scandinavian prankster filmmaker Mads Brugger donned his pith helmet and jodhpurs in Angola to impersonate a blood diamond buyer – recording on…

City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, and the New Hollywood Cinema »

By Heather Hendershot. The following is excerpted from When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, edited by Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (Cornell University Press, 2019), by permission…

A still from Love, Antosha Garret Price, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Anton Yelchin

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An Old Soul Gone Too Soon: Love, Antosha »

By Yun-hua Chen. Paying tribute to the late actor Anton Yelchin’s life, this biographical documentary extends far beyond his acting career. As Garret Price’s directorial debut premiered at…

Mike Wallace is Here – and Isn’t »

By Christopher Sharrett. The premises of the new documentary Mike Wallace is Here are contradictory, and I suppose meant ironically so. The late TV journalist, most famous for…

Festival Reports

Crises in Detail: AFI Docs 2019 »

By Gary M. Kramer. At the 2019 AFI Docs Film Festival this year, five provocative shorts and features tackled important topics ranging from the drug crisis and immigration to the creationism debate and…

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…

Interview

A Hidden Gem: Interview with Trương Minh Quý (Nhà cây / Tree House, 2019) »

By Yun-hua Chen. A hidden gem in the sidebar section “Concorso Cineasti del presente” at Locarno Film Festival, Trương Minh…

By John Duncan Talbird. Grady Hendrix is a novelist, sometimes-journalist, essayist, and screenwriter. He’s written several horror novels, including…

By Tom Ue. Aaron Harvey is the writer and director of several award-winning feature films including Catch.44 (2011), starring…

By David A. Ellis. Fifty-year-old Mike Hall is a film composer who lives in Le Claire Iowa. He grew…

By Jeremy Carr. On the occasion of two recently published collections – Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues (2018) and…

By N. Buket Cengiz. The 12th edition of Documentarist, the sole independent documentary festival in Turkey, was held on 15-20…

By Ali Moosavi. Pendulum is the first film made by Amir Ganjavie, an Iranian diaspora film critic (and a Film…

By N. Buket Cengiz. Documentarist, an independent documentary film festival held in Istanbul since 2007, had the acclaimed British…

By Alex Ramon. As the place that produced the likes of Wajda, Polański, Kieślowski and Skolimowski, and that, under…

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…

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

On Mutants, Monsters and Mushroom Clouds – Apocalypse Then: American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951-1967 by Mike Bogue »

A Book Review by Matthew Fullerton. Apocalypse Then (McFarland, 2017) is an informative and entertaining examination, and comparison, of science fiction films from the U.S. and Japan with both indirect and…

Theatrical, Organic Unity: Marcel Pagnol’s The Baker’s Wife (Criterion Collection) »

By Tony Williams. Though most notably associated with the Marseille Trilogy of Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and Cesar (1936) as well as the first version of Manon of the Springs…

Two from Venice 2019: The Scarecrows and Corpus Christie »

By Ali Moosavi. Two films which premiered in the 2019 Venice Film Festival, both looking critically at the role of religion in modern society. The Scarecrows, written and directed by…

Dachra: A Different Kind of Tunisian Revolution »

By Greg Burris. Early on in the Tunisian horror film Dachra (Abdelhamid Bouchnak, 2018), we see a class of university students as they listen to their professor’s instructions for their…

Scared Second – American Horror Project: Volume Two (Arrow Video) »

By Rod Lott. One could find irony in the United States’ collective history of regional horror films being written by a Brit. Instead, I choose to thank him for it.…

Oy, Vat a Story! Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles »

By Elias Savada. At moments during filmmaker Max Lewkowicz’s lovely homage to one of the world’s greatest musicals, I was verklempt. I got choked up over Chaim Topol’s interpretation of…

Dividing Lines: Tony Richardson’s The Border (Kino Lorber) »

By Jeremy Carr. Immigration enforcement agent Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson), who moves from Los Angeles to El Paso, where he joins the Texas sector’s border patrol, says he just wants…

Danish Redux: After the Wedding »

By Elias Savada. Sad to say, but it wasn’t a good idea for American filmmaker Bart Freundlich to remake the Oscar-nominated Best Foreign Language Feature Efter Brylluppet (After the Wedding),…

Compelling, if Problematic: William Friedkin’s Crusing (Arrow Video) »

By Gary M. Kramer. Arrow Films’ new Blu-ray edition of William Friedkin’s Cruising offers viewers the opportunity to reconsider this “controversial” thriller nearly 40 years after it was initially released. The…

A Subjective and Concise Triumph – The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media and the Radical Imagination by Greg Burris »

A Book Review Essay by Ali Moosavi. There is an old adage that oppression and suppression fuels creativity. In the world of cinema, this is best exemplified in Palestinian Cinema.…

An Invigorating Romp: Murray Pomerance’s A Dream of Hitchcock »

A Book Review by John W. Fawell. The title of Murray Pomerance’s latest book on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY Press, 2018), refers to both…

Coming of Age, in Detail: Third Wife »

The Truth Lies….: Cold Case Hammarskjöld »

An Old Soul Gone Too Soon: Love, Antosha »

By Yun-hua Chen. Paying tribute to the late actor Anton Yelchin’s life, this biographical documentary extends far beyond his acting career. As Garret Price’s directorial debut premiered at the Sundance…

Mike Wallace is Here – and Isn’t »

By Christopher Sharrett. The premises of the new documentary Mike Wallace is Here are contradictory, and I suppose meant ironically so. The late TV journalist, most famous for helping start…

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Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché – Saluting the Film Archival Community »

By Elias Savada. In a way, I consider myself a film archivist. I don’t do that for a living now, but I do have close ties with many such institutions,…

The Excelling Historical Document – Film and the Historian: The British Experience by Philip Gillett »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Some months ago, I struggled through a book about remembering British Television published by the BFI. My dissatisfaction with the contents stemmed from my…

Enthralling Familiarity: Claudio Giovannesi’s Pirahnas »

By Ali Moosavi. Pirahnas, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, is based on a novel by Roberto Saviano, who also co-wrote the…

The Mountain: A Discouraging Word »

By Christopher Sharrett. My subtitle is taken from a moment in Rick Alverson’s film The Mountain, where we see a black-and-white, furniture-bound TV, the type representative of the 1950s, showing Perry…

Diverted Dreams: Astronaut (2019) »

By Jeremy Carr. Septuagenarian grandfather Angus (Richard Dreyfuss) has harbored dreams of space since he was a child. Although the waning years of his life have generally clouded those fancies,…

On the Border, with Soap Opera: Tel Aviv on Fire (2018) »

By Yun-hua Chen. What would bring the two opposing sides across the Israel-Palestinian borders together? Tel Aviv on Fire’s answer is, through a popular tear-jerking soap opera and some good…

By Rod Lott. Ah, young love! When John (enfant terrible extraordinaire Klaus Kinski) meets Helen (Margaret Lee, Venus in Furs) on holiday…

By Martin Kudláč. The Brazilian cinema has been in the viewfinder of the International Film Festival Rotterdam for some time now and certainly…

By Gary M. Kramer. Made in 2017, but just getting a release now, Jan Zabeil’s Three Peaks is a flinty chamber drama set mainly…

By Ali Moosavi. If the quality of a country’s cinema is judged on a per capita basis, then surely Palestine would be…

By Mina Radovic. Richard Billingham’s debut as a director is an unjudgmental, observational, frequently difficult, and highly internalized portrait of his family.…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This recent monograph (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2019) aims to debate the importance of everyday TV memories involving academics,…

By Ali Moosavi. Two films competing for the main prizes at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Both having a person’s name…

By Michael Sandlin. Greg Kinnear has come a long way since his early 1990s career phase sniggering at daytime talk show freaks…

By Ali Moosavi. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, a number of national filmmakers, who were well-established in their homeland, such as…

By Gary M. Kramer. Heredity filmmaker Ari Aster’s eagerly awaited sophomore feature, Midsommar, is impressive when one looks at the craft that…

By Jeremy Carr. “Love has reasons that even reason can’t understand.” This is what the father of soccer star Diamantino Matamouros once…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Moseby Confidential: Night Moves and the Rise of Neo-Noir (Jorvik Press, 2019) is an interesting monograph of a…

By John Duncan Talbird. In 1988, Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize. Five years later, she won the Nobel…

By Yun-hua Chen. Very few films can capture the feelings of a dream in an audio-visually mesmerizing way. What Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar…

By Christopher Sharrett. Bruno Dumont is one of the outstanding figures of the twenty-first century’s European cinema, so the Criterion hi-definition releases…

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

By Thomas Puhr. Denys Arcand’s The Fall of the American Empire (2018) asks a question that most never have the luxury to…

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

By Elias Savada. Wanna watch a train wreck? Sienna Miller plays one in Jake Scott’s third feature. For the first half-hour of…

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

By Elias Savada. Here’s a twist on one of those what if comic book, sci-fi scenarios. What if an alien baby (conveniently…

By Ali Moosavi. I have been an ardent Brian De Palma fan ever since watching Phantom of the Paradise at the cinemas…

A Film/Book Review by Tony Williams. While we eagerly await the Criterion release of The Sound of Music with audio-commentary by Quentin…

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…

By Matthew Sorrento. Marlina begins with a scenario all too familiar: the title character, recently widowed, is now an object of desire…

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

By Ali Moosavi. Somehow I had not seen any of Celine Sciamma’s films until watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire at…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Hong Kong cinema studies has received detailed coverage over the decades in works written about specific…

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.…

By Ali Moosavi. Twenty-five years ago Pulp Fiction premiered at Cannes, won the Palm D’Or, and had an everlasting impact on the…

By Elias Savada. Harold Jackson III is a very focused, and quite talented, individual. He does just about everything in Unarmed Man, his…

By Ali Moosavi. Pain and Glory is Pedro Almodovar at his most personal and confessional, in the same vein as Bad Education…

By Jeremy Carr. Zhang Yimou has had a remarkable career, one distinguished by its approximate division into two distinct phases. There were…

By John Duncan Talbird. In 1956, Swedish author Harry Martinson wrote an epic poem called Aniara. It tells the story of the eponymous…

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

A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. As its title of this collection makes clear, The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A…

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…

Producer-Director Aldrich at a Crossroads: The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Grissom Gang (1971) from Kino Lorber »

A Review Essay by Tony Williams. Following the commercial success of The Dirty Dozen (1967), iconoclastic director Robert Aldrich fulfilled his dream…

By Jeremy Carr. Septuagenarian grandfather Angus (Richard Dreyfuss) has harbored dreams of space since he was a child. Although the waning years…

By Tony Williams. While we lament today current low standards represented by mainstream Hollywood cinema, those of us resilient enough to resist…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This recent monograph (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2019) aims to debate the importance of everyday TV memories involving academics,…

By Christopher Sharrett. Bruno Dumont is one of the outstanding figures of the twenty-first century’s European cinema, so the Criterion hi-definition releases…

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Christopher Sharrett. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away is a good – but not great – film of this past…

By Marjorie Sturm. I am the director and producer of the The Cult of JT LeRoy, the documentary that explores the elaborate…

By Thomas Gladysz. The Chaperone, the first theatrical release from PBS Masterpiece, is a story of beginnings as well as a kind…

“Daredevils of the Red Circle and Other Cliffhangers” is a blog on serials by Geoffrey Mayer, the author of Encyclopedia of American Film Serials (McFarland,…

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

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. In 1904, Lenin once wrote a monograph, “One Step Forward, two Steps Back” (1) that…

By Christopher Sharrett. I commented early this week on the ruthlessness of death. The occasion was my remembrance of Larry Cohen, a…

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…