Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

Art and Healing – The 5 Browns: Digging Through the Darkness »

By Elizabeth Toohey. Kelly; the backlash against Gillette; the abduction of 13-year-old Jayme Closs, held captive for three months; Larry Nassar’s abuse of upwards of 300 gymnasts entrusted to…

First Man and Last Things »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have just recently seen Damien Chazelle’s First Man after putting it off during its initial release. The film holds some interest for me, unlike…

Just Slightly Off: True Stories »

By John Duncan Talbird. My friends and I loved the Talking Heads when we were in college. You could not go a week in our house without hearing at…

There’s No Place Like Home: Revisiting Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (Criterion Collection) »

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

Re-Working Hitchcock: Brian De Palma’s Sisters (Criterion Collection) »

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

Natalie Portman and Pablo Larrain on the set of Jackie

Notes on Pablo Larraín »

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

Screwball/Great Depression Denial Syndrome: My Man Godfrey (Criterion Collection) »

By Tony Williams. Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) is admittedly one of the best screwball comedies of the 1930s that provided witty dialogue, entertainment, and “acceptable”…

From a Longtime Insider/Outsider – Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies »

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

Colette in the #MeToo Era »

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

“Good Sausage”: Felix Feist’s The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950) from Flicker Alley »

By Tony Williams. Imagine Lee J. Cobb (1911-1976) playing a star role as an honest cop turned bad played for a sucker by femme fatale Jane Wyatt (1910-2006),…

Cinema Thinks: Film as Philosophy Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath »

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. The multi-authored book is a misnomer. Although out in the world there is no taint to the word “anthology,” it…

Festival Reports

The Dawn of New Era: Locarno 2018 »

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…

By Alex Ramon. “You need an independent spirit if you’re going to go into film or music: so many people will tell you that you can’t do it,” said Diane Warren, on stage…

By Michael Miller. The 17th Tribeca Film Festival unspooled April 18 – 29, 2018 across seven venues in Manhattan. The festival celebrates storytelling whether in the form of narrative features, documentary, virtual reality and…

By Martin Kudláč. For some time, Berlinale has been grooming its image as a political film festival. Its 2018 edition, which is its current director’s penultimate edition in charge as Dieter Kosslick is to…

By Robert Buckeye. The centenary of the formation of Czechoslovakia and the half century commemoration of the Prague Spring transformed Art Film Fest in Košice, Slovakia (15-23 June) this year into a seminar…

By Janine Gericke. I’ve been going to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) for ten years. My first introduction to the festival and the Castro Theatre was Buster Keaton’s 1923 film Our…

By Gary M. Kramer. The 2018 AFI Docs Film Festival screened over 90 features and shorts in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, MD. The films tackled topical issues such as the plight of…

Interview

Staying in the Present: Brendan Meyer and Sam McCarthy on All These Small Moments »

By Travis Merchant. At some point, films focused on teenage characters started growing stale with repeating motifs, themes, and…

By Tom Ue. My Life with James Dean finds Géraud Champreux (Johnny Rasse), the film’s central protagonist, presenting his first…

By Anna Weinstein. Rachel S. Harris’s book Warriors, Witches, and Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2017)…

By Sergey Toymentsev. Alexei Uchitel is the leading Russian director whose features regularly receive awards at international and domestic festivals.…

By Tom Ue. With A Moment in the Reeds, London-based filmmaker Mikko Mäkelä seeks to fill the queer void…

By Ali Moosavi. Iranian cinema has made its mark on the global film world thanks to film makers such…

By Tom Ue. Much of contemporary crime fiction revolves around the search for resolution rather than solution. Some, such…

By Roberto Cavallini. Yom Adaatou Zouli (The Day I Lost my Shadow) by Syrian director Soudade Kaadan, was presented…

By Yun-hua Chen. Watching Aquarela, a documentary under the section of Out of Competition in Venice International Film Festival, is…

By Janine Gericke. What makes Lisa D’Apolito’s new film Love, Gilda so special is that, like the 2015 documentaries Listen to…

By Areum Jeong. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, South Korea’s first found-footage horror film, directed by Bum-shik Jung, is a low-budget film that scored…

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

Art and Healing – The 5 Browns: Digging Through the Darkness »

By Elizabeth Toohey. Kelly; the backlash against Gillette; the abduction of 13-year-old Jayme Closs, held captive for three months; Larry Nassar’s abuse of upwards of 300 gymnasts entrusted to his care;…

Journeywoman – Claire Trevor: The Life and Films of the Queen of Noir by Derek Sculthorpe »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Yorkshire resident Derek Sculthorpe is an archivist who has also written plays, short stories, and articles as well as other books on Hollywood stars,…

Beyond a Horror Anthology: Spirits of the Dead by Tim Lucas »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Initiated last year with the appearance of monograph studies of Theatre of Blood and Martin, this enterprising series now includes this study of a…

The Other Tounge(s) of Iran: Hendi and Hormoz (Iranian Film Festival of New York) »

By Arash Azizi. Hendi and Hormoz, which screened at the first-ever Iranian Film Festival of New York on January 11, has many alarming elements: A child marriage, an early-teen pregnancy,…

Choosing Sides: The Standoff at Sparrow Creek »

By Jeremy Carr. The men of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek exist in a world of violence. It can be a basic violence, natural even, as when Gannon (James Badge…

When a Documentary Isn’t: Inside Slovenian Non-Fiction Films »

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

Hail Mary! – Fanchon The Cricket (1915) and Little Annie Rooney (1925) from Flicker Alley »

By Tony Williams. These DVD restorations represent another important collaborative venture on the part of The Mary Pickford Foundation and Flicker Alley, a company specializing in promoting often forgotten achievements…

A Quiet State: Maine »

By Janine Gericke. Matthew Brown’s Maine is a quiet, observational film, in every sense. Not a word is uttered for nearly the first 10 minutes of the film and there…

Maryland, Oy Maryland: Sickies Making Films »

By Elias Savada. Baltimore filmmaker Joe Tropea tackles a not very pressing subject with his new film. It’s an admirable history lesson and enjoyable examination of Maryland’s long-deceased era of…

Uma: Invoking Love, Death and an Elsewhere »

By Devapriya Sanyal. Uma is Srijit Mukherji’s twelfth film in seven years. It is based on a real story, which by the director’s own admission he found on Facebook. He…

Fair and Balanced, for Real – Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes »

By Michael Sandlin. Alexis Bloom’s Divide and Conquer could have easily been conceived as a shameless liberal hit job on an easy target: far-right fake news guru and prolific sexual harasser…

Choosing Your Own Family: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters »

By Matthew Fullerton. Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest drama, the Palme-d’Or-winning Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku), is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary family: Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) is a middle-aged man who,…

The Man Who Would Be Scar – Henry Brandon: King of the Bogeymen by Bill Cassara and Richard S. Greene »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. In one way, my title is misleading. Despite the impressive appearance of Henry Brandon’s Scar appearing as an appropriate “monster from the id” with blue…

More than Rippin’ or Rascality: Jonah Hill’s Mid90s »

By Brandon Konecny. “My visceral reaction when I hear someone is making a movie about skateboarding is…I wish they [sic] wouldn’t,” says professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen. And his remarks are…

Rebirth: Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria »

By Janine Gericke. In 1977, Italian horror legend Dario Argento released Suspiria – a seminal classic among horror fans and cinephiles. Luca Guadagnino, whose Call Me by Your Name won raves last year,…

Struggling Adrift: The Raft (Flotten) »

By Daniel Lindvall. In May 1973 six women and five men set out from the Canary Islands to cross the Atlantic to Mexico in a twelve by seven metres large…

The Sweet, Swedish Smell of Fear: Border »

By Elias Savada. Scandinavian folklore is home to dozens of curious creatures. Trolls, dwarves, and elves might be the ones most of us on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean…

Art Loving Criminals: Ruben Brandt, Collector »

By Martin Kudláč. The Locarno International Film Festival has a notorious sweet spot, Piazza Grande, one of the biggest squares in Switzerland where it is hosting open-air night screenings for over…

Rehistoricizing the Gaze – Elena Gorfinkel’s Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s »

A Book Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. There’s a shared lightning bolt moment I’ve discussed at length with many other film critics and academics – mostly (although certainly not only) women…

Born to Kill: El Angel »

By Michael Sandlin. Director Luis Ortega’s El Angel (co-produced by Pedro Almodovar) is a quietly disturbing but ultimately unsatisfying character study based on real-life 1970s Argentinian teen serial killer Carlos…

A Formidable Pairing: Green Book »

By Elias Savada. The exceptionally crisp performances by Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are but two of the great things about Green Book, a very solid contender for Best Picture accolades,…

By Elias Savada. The breakneck parade of Hollywood celebrities seems endless in Peter Bogdanovich’s love letter to silent film comedian Buster Keaton. It…

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 by Madeline Hawk. Using prolific Korean New Wave director Im Kwon-Taek to introduce Korean cinema’s preoccupation with its colonial…

By Janine Gericke. I really wanted to like Killer Kate! It’s clear that director Elliot Feld loves horror movies and has grown…

By Jeremy Carr. The opening narration of The Naked Prey (1965) sets the scene in the African wilderness and the nature of humanity in…

By Janine Gericke. Director Megan Griffiths has made a captivating film about how one parent’s absence can have immense complications on the…

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. For many today, the name John Barrymore means little – except, perhaps, that it shares the…

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 Gary M. Kramer. The gentle, charming documentary, Tea with the Dames eavesdrops on the gossip, memories, and laughs shared by four…

By Christopher Sharrett. Yann Demange’s White Boy Rick is a smaller-budget film of the season almost buried by franchise movies like The…

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

By Janine Gericke. Lizzie Borden’s infamous story is horrifying. On August 4, 1892, Borden’s father and stepmother were found bludgeoned to death…

By Elias Savada. Alex Honnold dreams the impossible dream, and he climbs where the brave dare not go. Unlike Don Quixote, he defies…

By Jeremy Carr. Street Mobster found director Kinji Fukasaku at a pivotal point in his career, a situation reflected in the evolution of…

By Alex Brannan. If one were to just slightly retool Phillip Guzman’s Sleep No More (aka 200 Hours) – eliminate the gore…

By Elias Savada. Hal (no relation to the sentient computer in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey), is a reflective meditation on…

A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. For many, the term “avant-garde” is synonymous with pretension: a sub-subgenre that revels in its impenetrability…

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. For those experiencing a Jess Franco film for the first time, the response is unlikely to…

By Elias Savada. The crazy wait-who-did-what? mystery that is A Simple Favor offers up a pair of smooth, subversive, suburban housewives that spin…

By Ali Moosavi. Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has had a rapid rise in the last few years to become one of…

By Elias Savada. Science Fair, the new National Geographic documentary, follows the audience-pleasing formula easily recognizable in its predecessors. There are many fans…

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. Steven Gerrard’s The Modern British Horror Film (Rutgers University Press, 2017) is a slim, pocketbook-sized volume.…

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. Silent film great Harry Langdon died at sixty of a cerebral hemorrhage three years before…

By Alex Ramon. Without a doubt, the biggest Polish cinematic success of the past decade has been Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida. Feted…

By Janine Gericke. Based on the novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop takes place in a conservative coastal village in…

By Alex Brannan. A quick search into the work of Rene Daalder yields an interesting array of artistic pieces varied in concept, medium,…

By Janine Gericke. How do we balance work, family, friends, everything in our lives without breaking? This relatable film is a study…

By John Duncan Talbird. New Zealand’s short-lived new wave came quite a bit after most other national cinemas’ new waves. Kick-started by the…

By Janine Gericke. Skate Kitchen is director Crystal Moselle’s first narrative feature following her 2015 documentary The Wolfpack. I knew in the first five minutes…

By Elizabeth Toohey. Sometimes, on my weirder, darker days, I fantasize about being the architect of a purgatory. There, I would place…

By John Duncan Talbird. Since 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio), time-lapse photography has become a convention, sometimes to the point of cliché. Still,…

A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. James Gracey’s Devil’s Advocates entry on The Company of Wolves (Auteur Publishing, 2017) does everything a…

By Alex Brannan. After gaining attention in Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968), legendary character actor Malcolm McDowell jump-started his career with a pair of films…

By Jeremy Carr. Highlighting the Arrow Video Blu-ray of Death Smiles on a Murderer (also known as Death Smiled at Murder) is a…

By Janine Gericke. Xavier Legrand’s Custody (Jusqu’à La Garde) is a child-custody thriller. And, the word “thriller” doesn’t usually come to mind when thinking…

By Elias Savada. A piece of the infamous “Gooble Gobble” carnival communal wedding chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) isn’t the only ditty…

By Thomas Puhr. Is the pen indeed mightier than the sword, as Bulwer-Lytton’s adage would have us believe? This ever-prescient question drives…

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Carol J. Clover takes a critical look at horror and exploitation…

By Christopher Sharrett. One would think that the fascination with apocalypse in cinema peaked, perhaps, in the late 70s-early 80s, with the…

By Alex Brannan. “Be in bed by midnight’s bell. Never let a stranger through your door. Never leave each other all alone.”…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. The name of Jimmy Edwards (1920-1988) may not be familiar to American audiences, let alone contemporary…

By Jeremy Carr. Embracing a road trip structure, which is always conducive to a film concerning self-reflective journeys of the soul, Eugene Jarecki’s…

By Thomas Puhr. One may argue that the “feuding neighbors” subgenre is overdone, having been explored in films like John G. Avildsen’s…

By Tony Williams. One can never have too much of a good thing and the successful works of The Archers defines this…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This book is an excellent addition to the Bear Manor Media repertoire. Written by an independent…

By Elias Savada. I’ve been told, at rare moments throughout my life, that I look just like someone else, other than my dad…

By Gary M. Kramer. John Waters has achieved respectability (again). After 2016’s successful Criterion Collection release of Multiple Maniacs, the premier film…

By Elizabeth Toohey. Is the designer Vivienne Westwood anti-establishment or is she the establishment? Is she iconoclast or icon? More to the…

By Jeremy Carr. Writer-director Víctor Erice can be forgiven if he speaks of El Sur (newly released by the Criterion Collection) with more…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. During and since the time of Welles’s Centenary, many fine books and articles have appeared re-evaluating…

Beyond Genre to the Other Arts: King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) from the Criterion Collection »

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,…

By André Seewood. Every weekend numerous websites inform us of the short term box office grosses of various films like Star Wars: The…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Captain Hornsby: “What an extraordinary fellow!” Colonel Thompson: “Well, he’s an American.” – Too Late the…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. If Dr. Johnson had James Bosworth as his chronicler in the inimitable The Life of…

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. There are snowy peaks all around, majestic crests, and the mountains tower like Holy Cathedrals.…

By Matthew Sorrento. After the release of his horror-comedy Re-Animator (1985), debuting filmmaker Stuart Gordon was very conscious that the film would…

By Tony Williams. 1946 was an “annus mirabilis” (“amazing year” for those who never studied Latin) for American, British film noir, and…

By Tony Williams. Following the release of several new remastered DVDs after the 2015 Orson Welles Centenary and the expected completion of…

A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. “Even today, I’ve no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it.”…

By Tony Williams. This is the moment when the Italianization of the Western was complete. –Alberto Moravia, quoted by Christopher Frayling As…

By Christopher Sharrett. One of the characteristics of our militarized society, aside from the constant deluge of cop shows, superhero movies, and…

By Christopher Weedman. Walter Matthau (1920-2000) was among Hollywood’s most charismatic stars of the late 1960s and 1970s. During this fascinating period…

By Christopher Sharrett. I count Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) among his supreme masterpieces, along with Code Unknown (2000), Cache (2005),…

By Johannes Schönherr. New York City, June 27th 1993: Notorious punk rocker GG Allin had finally served out a lengthy prison sentence in…

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. David Simon’s television series The Wire ran on HBO from 2002-2008, five seasons of a…

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. The Indian film critics have done it again! As Glover and Kaplan state in their book Genders, the term “gender”…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. It is as if in movies, TV and books, genre progresses through a series of…

By Heather Hendershot. One week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here reached the #9 position in book sales on Amazon. Brave…

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. It may be tempting to recommend Scarface (1932) or Little Caesar (1930) as a first…

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Many decades ago I heard a comment made by a respected scholar, and affirmed by…

by John Andrew Gallagher. Tay Garnett and and writer Howard Higgin spent the months of February and March, 1930 on Catalina Island…

By Christopher Weedman. The Criterion Collection deserves to be commended for their continued efforts to bring greater attention to the underappreciated films…

By Christopher Sharrett. Readers will note that my title derives from essays and certain phrases by Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F.…

By Brandon Konecny. It has been suggested, sometimes by Moldovan film professionals themselves, that cinema does not currently exist in the Republic…

By Orville Lloyd Douglas. Black people are still mentally enslaved; even in the 21st century there is a psychic need by some…

By Tony Williams. As I write, hours tick away for the latest unimportant event in film history – the Hollywood Academy Awards…

“May Well Offend” – Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics by Anthony Slide »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Deliberately described as a “provocative film scholar,” this prolific, self-educated expert in film, who has written more than 250 books in the area…