Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

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…

Far from Paradise: Dietrich and Von Sternberg in Hollywood (Criterion Collection) »

By Tony Williams. A box set containing the Josef Von Sternberg (1894-1969) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) collaboration, even if copyright reasons exclude The Blue Angel (1930), would appear…

For and Against the Grand Narrative: The Hollywood War Film by Daniel Binns »

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Genre studies, whether treating film genre history as evolutionary or as cycles, always has to fight the charge that genre films…

Rediscovering a “Lost Art”: How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Any book or article by Joseph McBride is worth reading, especially in this era of mostly dismal films and an unqualified…

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)

The Epitome of Cool: The Films of Ray Danton by Joseph Fusco »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. I initially saw this 2010 book as a main feature on this company’s web site and requested a review copy, thinking it was…

“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…

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 such as Bela Tarr and Andrei…

MV5BMmYzOWQ1NzItYjkyOC00MmUyLWE4MDEtNGQyYjUxMWI2YTg1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDI3OTIzOA@@._V1_

Why the Neglect?: Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927) »

By John W. Fawell. The following is an excerpt from Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg: the Art of Classic Hollywood, now available from Lexington Books/Rowman &…

Maker:0x4c,Date:2017-12-12,Ver:4,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar01,E-Y

The Cinematic Form of the Football Match »

By Declan Cochran. Introduction (Pre-Match Warm-Up) Cinematically speaking, the filmed football match is a curious phenomenon, one that seems to integrate a number of cinematic techniques whilst, obviously,…

Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice: Against All Doctrine »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about Andrei Tarkovsky, about whom I’ve been hesitant for decades. A few remarks…

North Korea’s International Movie Co-Productions, 1985-2012 »

By Johannes Schönherr. Kim Jong Il, the son of North Korea’s founder and Great Leader Kim Il Sung, went early in his youth in the direction of eventually…

Festival Reports

States of Independence: the 8th Transatlantyk Festival, Łódź, Poland (July 2018) »

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…

By Ali Moosavi. It is very unusual for Cannes, or indeed any film festival that I care to remember, to provide a warning in the festival program for a particular film. In Cannes…

By Gary M. Kramer. The 20th Maryland Film Festival, held at the Parkway Theater and various additional venues in Baltimore, took place May 2-6. The program included more than 100 features, documentaries, and shorts.…

Interview

Ending the War in Perpetrator’s Clothes: Robert Shwentke on The Captain »

By Sergey Toymentsev. German-born director Robert Shwentke is mostly known for his glossy, action-packed Hollywood blockbusters, including RED, R.I.P.D, and…

By Jake Rutkowski. I confess I was intimidated by the prospect of interviewing Tag Gallagher regarding John Ford: Himself and…

By Travis Merchant. A biopic usually comes with a load of questions for a viewer: How much of the…

By Gary M. Kramer. Actor Mauricio Ochmann has become a popular leading man in Mexican cinema. He worked steadily…

By Tom Ue. Casey Wilder Mott served as Director of Development for Flashlight Films, a boutique film finance company…

By Tom Ue. Israeli-born film director and video artist Ofir Raul Graizer lives and works in nexus of Berlin,…

By Travis Merchant. In today’s age of fake news, constant debates, and online videos that depict two sides arguing…

By Daniel Lindvall. S|T|R|A|Y|S, described by its makers as “a living graphic novel,” portrays a cross section of contemporary…

By Tom Ue. With more than 900K followers on Instagram alone, writer and director Max Emerson uses his social…

By Tom Ue. Bob Farkas took the biggest gamble of his life when he became, at the age of 53,…

By Tom Ue. Serge Bozon’s latest film Mrs. Hyde follows the plight of a science teacher at a technical…

Jake Rutkowski: Thanks much for the kind words, Tony and Richmond! Ford really does represent the platonic ideal of a...
Richmond Adams: Marvelous exchange of insights !
Tony Williams: Jake, an exceptionally fine and culturally relevant interview. Well done!
Tony Williams: Thanks Chris, In his recent book TWO CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD, Joe McBride mentions in his excellent...
Christopher Sharrett: Well done Tony. The set is important, but as you point out has serious flaws. We indeed depend...

Review

The Films of Jess Franco: Cinema on the Fringes »

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. For those experiencing a Jess Franco film for the first time, the response is unlikely to be an academic one. Known predominantly for horror…

Mommy Noir: A Simple Favor »

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 some sparkling dialogue off each other and their…

Angel and Phoenix: Two Rising at the Toronto International Film Festival »

By Ali Moosavi. Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has had a rapid rise in the last few years to become one of the A-List festivals alongside Cannes, Venice and Berlin.…

Beyond Geekdom: Science Fair »

By Elias Savada. Science Fair, the new National Geographic documentary, follows the audience-pleasing formula easily recognizable in its predecessors. There are many fans of Spellbound (2002), an enlightening race to the…

Praising the New Flesh: The Modern British Horror Film by Steven Gerrard »

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

The “Fourth Face” of Silent Comedy – Harry Langdon: King of Silent Comedy by Gabriella Oldham and Mabel Langdon »

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. Silent film great Harry Langdon died at sixty of a cerebral hemorrhage three years before Christmas day in 1944. He died broke; and…

Marketable Polish Melancholy: Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War »

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

Unfulfilled Desire: The Bookshop »

By Janine Gericke. Based on the novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop takes place in a conservative coastal village in 1950’s England (though the backdrop is actually Northern…

Scattershot Disorder(s) in Rene Daalder’s Hysteria »

By Alex Brannan. A quick search into the work of Rene Daalder yields an interesting array of artistic pieces varied in concept, medium, and scope. The writer, director, and digital effects…

The New Delicate Balance: Support the Girls »

By Janine Gericke. How do we balance work, family, friends, everything in our lives without breaking? This relatable film is a study of working class America with echoes of the…

Smash Palace, A Wreck in Slow Motion »

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 New Zealand Film Commission with tax breaks for…

Rewarding Curiosity: Skate Kitchen »

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 that I was going to love this movie,…

Broken, Yet Living: Memoir of War (La Douleur) »

By Elizabeth Toohey. Sometimes, on my weirder, darker days, I fantasize about being the architect of a purgatory. There, I would place Mark Zuckerberg – who has lately said he…

The Cinematic Poetry of Cielo »

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, we’re stunned every now and then by its…

Telling Tales: The Company of Wolves by James Gracey »

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

Shifty Business: Pound of Flesh »

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 that embellished moral ambiguities as they pertain to…

Gothic Grotesque: Aristide Massaccesi’s Death Smiles on a Murderer (Arrow Video) »

By Jeremy Carr. Highlighting the Arrow Video Blu-ray of Death Smiles on a Murderer (also known as Death Smiled at Murder) is a video essay by Kat Ellinger. In this roughly…

A Child Custody Thriller »

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 about custody battles. But, that’s just what this…

A True Beauty: Chained for Life »

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 from that horror classic paid homage to in…

Political and Literary Exile: Nicolas Pariser’s The Great Game »

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 writer-director Nicolas Pariser’s 2015 feature debut, The Great…

Forgotten “Final Girls”: The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle by Alexandra West »

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Carol J. Clover takes a critical look at horror and exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s that were…

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…

By Elias Savada. There’s an unsettling blandness flowing through The Catcher Was a Spy, a well photographed and impressively designed film about a…

By Thomas Puhr. Paul Schrader takes Christianity seriously: no small feat, given that many “Christian” movies today are of the schmaltzy, Sunday…

By Christopher Sharrett. As the end credits roll for Ari Aster’s horror film Hereditary, we hear Judy Collins sing her hit song…

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. Scott Edwards’s new book (McFarland, 2018) is anything but a garden variety biography of an…

By Jeremy Carr. As noted by no less an authority than Mr. MonsterVision himself, Joe Bob Briggs, to distinguish a good Herschell…

By Elias Savada. One way or another, I always seem to get a plastic high when watching a film with an old…

By Janine Gericke. I’ll start by saying that The Gospel According to André is a delightful film about a delightful human. The…

A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. Whenever one sets out to write a book about a real-life person, be it a traditional…

By Elias Savada. I’m a latecomer to the work of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, but I recently caught Night and Day (2004)…

By Elias Savada. The word “breathtaking” doesn’t do justice to Australian documentarian Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain. It’s so far beyond that. The manner of…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have commented on this site at length on Cristian Mungiu’s masterpiece Beyond the Hills (2012), and while it…

By Elias Savada, In a galaxy far, far away, veteran multi-hyphenate filmmaker Ron Howard has directed Solo with a sure, reliable hand, cobbling…

By Janine Gericke. Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience is a frustrating film. Not because of poor performances or a meandering story, but because it’s…

A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. Through the course of Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam University…

By Janine Gericke. Clocking in at a cool 78 minutes, Sara Driver’s documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel…

By Elias Savada. So, as numerous superhero universes collide in worldwide multiplexes, you might wonder if there is an escalating case of…

By Jeremy Carr. Marcel Perez certainly isn’t the most renowned name in silent screen comedy. He’s likely not even among its top…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. It is frequently true that publishers like Bear Manor Media not only offer the possibility of…

By Thomas Puhr. On paper, Lynne Ramsay’s breathtaking You Were Never Really Here (2017) sounds like one of Luc Besson’s off-the-cuff side…

By Brandon Konecny. There’s a scene in Measure of a Man where Bobby (Blake Cooper) bickers with his sister Michelle (Liana Liberato) after…

The Shining (1980) A Book Review by Tony Williams. During my final year in what was soon becoming Thatcher’s “green and septic…

A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. In 2004, Michael Temple and Michael Witt published the first edition of The French Cinema Book (Palgrave/BFI,…

By Tony Williams. It appears very unusual to think that the debonair star we tend to think of as an actual person…

By Alex Brannan. To break it down into the simplest of taxonomies, there are two types of horror anthology film: those which…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This concisely written and informative monograph represents a critical examination of the role cityscapes play within…

By Elias Savada. It’s fitting that this refreshing documentary starts out with the world renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman performing a rousing rendition of…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have no reservations about using a central, foundational handbook serving women as the subtitle to this piece (in…

By Elias Savada. I’ve been a fan of horror maestros Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead ever since catching their 2012 feature debut Resolution…

By Alex Brannan. There is a critical stigma to the small subset of films that comprise the rape-revenge genre – or, at the…

By Jeremy Carr. Even if there wasn’t a compelling, underlying thesis to Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda: 1933–1945, this…

By Dean Goldberg. While I’ll admit that Pong was the last video game I had any interest in and more recently got sea…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. According to an old saying about not judging a book by its cover, the same can…

By Travis Merchant. Recently, the rise of extreme right-wing groups and individuals have done more than upset the quotidian structure to society. More often than…

By Jeremy Carr. On the day of her son’s wedding, presumably the central event of 1945, drug-addled Anna (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) ominously observes,…

A Book Review by Dean Goldberg. While the introduction to this collection of published essays from the storied Spectator, the University of…

By Travis Merchant. A decade has passed since the beginning of an economic recession that many still feel today. The recession of 2008…

By Elias Savada. I didn’t like Max Winkler’s first feature, the dreary comedy Ceremony (2011), a quirky tic of a wedding crasher…

By John Duncan Talbird. In the opening of the new documentary, Leaning Into the Wind, artist Andy Goldsworthy tours a small home in…

Beauty and the Dogs: Women’s Revolution in Tunisian Cinema »

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…

By Christopher Weedman. The past couple of months have been full of rich rewards for admirers of the late Abel Gance. This…

By Anthony J. Steinbock. The Maltese Falcon is often considered to be the first film noir of the classical noir period (beginning…

By Johannes Schönherr. The Lovers and the Despot, a 2016 documentary by British directors Robert Cannan and Ross Adam, tackles an especially…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have always thought that John Sturges’s 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven has suffered too unfavorably in comparison to…

By Tony Williams. Although this special Criterion three film DVD set has been available since 2008, it is only recently that I…

By Tony Williams. Long awaited by many, following either unavailability or dubious accessibility via duped 16mm copies, unwatchable VHS copies, and bootlegged…

By Ramin S. Khanjani. Of all directors associated with the pre-1979 “Iranian New Wave,” Nosratallah Karimi probably presents one odd case for…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about last year’s superb achievement by Laszlo…

By Michael Betancourt. Michael Morris’ expanded cinema performances, Second Hermeneutic (2013) lasting approximately nine minutes, and Third Hermeneutic (2014) lasting approximately eleven minutes,…

By Tony Williams. “She was so much more than the Green woman in Star Trek” (George Pappy DVD audio-commentary). “What I knew I…

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 seems that…

Far from Paradise: Dietrich and Von Sternberg in Hollywood (Criterion Collection) »

By Tony Williams. A box set containing the Josef Von Sternberg (1894-1969) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) collaboration, even if copyright reasons exclude The Blue Angel (1930), would appear the fulfillment…

For and Against the Grand Narrative: The Hollywood War Film by Daniel Binns »

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Genre studies, whether treating film genre history as evolutionary or as cycles, always has to fight the charge that genre films are conservative…

Rediscovering a “Lost Art”: How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Any book or article by Joseph McBride is worth reading, especially in this era of mostly dismal films and an unqualified plethora of…

The Epitome of Cool: The Films of Ray Danton by Joseph Fusco »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. I initially saw this 2010 book as a main feature on this company’s web site and requested a review copy, thinking it was a new…

“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…