By William Repass. Newton’s Third Law does not hold sway in Argentine filmmaker Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes, 2014). On the contrary, action leads only to overreaction, effect revenging itself on cause. Each of the six thematically interlocking shorts that comprise the film advances by means of escalation. In […]
Discovering Mary Pickford
By Tony Williams. The title of this article has a double meaning. It is primarily a reworking of that lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched 1999 publication Mary Pickford Rediscovered written by someone (Kevin Brownlow) who already knew her work and had the privilege of once meeting the 70 plus year-old […]
The 2015 AFI Docs Festival Report
July 1, 2015
By Gary M. Kramer. The AFI Docs film festival showcased more than 50 feature and short length documentaries in Washington, DC, and Silver Spring, MD venues. Here is a rundown of two World Premieres from the fest—1st and 17 and The Three Hikers—as well as reviews of several documentaries from the […]
Seeking the Intimate in The Overnight
June 25, 2015
By Paul Risker. Film cannot escape the inevitable measure of its worth – how close the pendulum of critical and spectatorial judgment swings towards success or failure. For some, the box office gross is the measure of success, while for others the subjective uncertainty of creative merit or the satisfying […]
Content and Technique in Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns
June 19, 2015
By James Knight. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), Jean-Paul Belmundo turns to man at a party and says, “you seem to be alone.” The man is of course Samuel Fuller, the writer and director of Forty Guns (1957). Via a translator Belmundo then asks Fuller what exactly cinema is, […]
Highlights from the 20th San Francisco Silent Film Festival
June 16, 2015
By Michael T. O’Toole. So, 20 years on and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) is still proving their commercial knack for showcasing movies that cover the timeline, genre gaps and stylistic stamps—not to mention innovative presentations and musical accompaniment that breathed new momentum into previous released material and […]
The Human Imperfection of The Falling
June 14, 2015
By Paul Risker. Worlds continue to merge as Carol Morley instigates an ongoing collision between narrative fiction and documentary within her young oeuvre. But with her most recent narrative fiction film The Falling (2015), this collision extends to the very fabric of the film itself. Beneath the surface of its […]
“Thinking as Negation”: Adorno, Vertigo, and the Paradoxical Promise of Popular Cinema
By Benjamin Bergholtz. “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [Dialectic of Enlightenment]: 99) Few critics have sought to bring the ideas of Theodor Adorno to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In itself, this is […]
Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (2013)
June 7, 2015
A Book Review by Martin Stollery. Framing Africa is a succinct book, academic in orientation, accessible in writing style, lacking illustrations, but graced with an arresting jacket design. Across an introduction and seven chapters, all but one of them focusing on a single example, Nigel Eltringham and his contributors survey […]
San Andreas: The Empty Catastrophe
June 3, 2015
By Christopher Sharrett. “Today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Quote attributed to Fredric Jameson, or Slavoj Zizek, or J.G. Ballard, or perhaps an urban legend. “It’s quite enjoyable to watch things being destroyed, sequence after sequence of […]