Big Day for a Small Finnish Town: Cinéma Laika

By Jonathan Monovich. Vidak/Felce’s film serves as a meaningful exploration of the role that cinema and movie theaters play in our lives.” Driving through the wooded roads of Karkkila, a small Finnish town, Emmanuelle Felce tells Veljko Vidak “I could live here. You can be in deep nature, beautiful nature. […]

A Lebanese Artist Challenged: Eric McGinty’s Stockade

By Ken Hall. Ahlam’s mission acquires a Hitchcockian aspect as this law-abiding artist in the US becomes trapped in a situation which she does not understand, with mysterious people posing a threat to her safety.” This subtly presented independent mystery-drama relates the economic and emotional challenges facing Lebanese artist Ahlam […]

Considering the Last Breath: An Interview with Costa-Gavras

By Ali Moosavi. It’s an important personal lesson to myself to learn to prepare myself to die with dignity. The others cannot help you and I think you have to know the truth.” —Costa-Gavras I first became aware of Costa-Gavras, and quickly became a fan, in the Seventies after watching […]

Eve and Her Siblings: Edward Burns’ Millers in Marriage

By Jonathan Monovich. Burns intends on making the Millers artists and is keen to understand that partnerships, like artists, do not always have the spark.” Writer/Director/Actor Edward Burns has long strived to live by Robert Bresson’s words “make visible what, without you, might perhaps never be seen.”1 His first film, […]

Sweet Dreams: Irony, Power Dynamics, and Dance in Kinds of Kindness

By M. Sellers Johnson. Through acute genre-defying sensibilities of black comedy, arbitrary of conduct, supernatural inflections, and elusive drama, the multi-narrative Kind of Kindness presents messy, yet biting tales of humanity beset by submission, conspiracy, and cults of persuasion.” Kinds of Kindness (2024) is a vigorous power play of peculiar […]

Unstoppable: Wrestling and the Plasmatic

By Justin Muchnick. No amount of movie magic, it seems, can fully replace Robles’ own unparalleled plasmaticness. I only wish Sergei Eisenstein could have seen this film, too….” The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of film theory and lover of Disney cartoons, coined the term plasmatic to describe the ecstatic […]