By Noah Charney. Branko Djuric, who goes by the nickname Djuro, is one the biggest film and television stars of the former Yugoslavia. His repertoire includes fistfuls of films, popular TV series, plays and even albums, spanning decades, so he is entirely used to receiving royalty statements and checks each […]
Fast & Furious 7: Balancing Frivolity and Depth
April 12, 2015
By Cleaver Patterson. Occasionally a film comes along which, though what unfolds on-screen is far from erudite, the final result manages the difficult feat of combining heart and spectacle to an equal degree. Fast & Furious 7 – the latest instalment in the worldwide cinematic phenomenon – will likely be […]
The BBC’s Israeli Drama Hostages: A Story of ‘Best Laid Plans’
April 6, 2015
By Paul Risker. Permeating contemporary film and television is the sense of an oppression of foreign language drama within storytelling, whose intentional or unintentional objective is the promotion of English as the officially sanctioned language of film and television drama. The words that most aptly describe this enduring threat are […]
Seed Money: Capturing a Pivotal Era of Gay Porn
April 4, 2015
By Mark James. The gains of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s rode the back of a gay culture that, in part, came together watching porn. Though erotic images of men have sold as long as pictures were for sale, court cases allowing images to be sent through […]
I for Iran: Critical notes on the political nature of the Tiff Cinematheque Iranian film series
By Amir Ganjavie. Since March 5, Toronto International Film Festival’s screening programme, TIFF Cinematheque, has presented a series called “I for Iran: A History of Iranian Cinema by Its Creators”. According to its website, “Selected by fourteen top Iranian filmmakers, the films in this essential retrospective comprise a capsule history […]
The 11th Annual Boulder International Film Festival
March 31, 2015
By Brad Weismann. The success rate is dismal. All the rules have changed. How does a film festival feel its way forward? The Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF), which took place this year from March 5th through March 8th, began its second decade by keeping its head down and sticking […]
Tall Tales: Now You Are, Now You’re Gone
By Noah Charney. Gangsters, guns, violence, wit. Let me begin by praising Tall Tales: Now You Are, Now You’re Gone (Suplje Price: Zdej te je, a zdej te ni) for being thoroughly un-Slovene. It has action and pace, two rare attributes in the world of Slovene cinema, which too often […]
El Club: A Berlinale Review
March 26, 2015
By Zhuo-Ning Su. When No (2012) took the festival circuit by storm and eventually won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination some years back, there were probably a handful of us who remained unconvinced or even slightly mystified. The historical drama about the ad campaign that brought down Pinochet’s military […]
Little Release and Little Inspiration: Tempo Documentary Festival, Stockholm 2015
By Axel Andersson. It was still cold when Stockholm’s documentary film festival Tempo opened in early March. The miserable rain underlined the city’s forlorn dampness for both old and new inhabitants. Roma hounded out of their central European homes by prejudice and persecution to beg through an unforgiving Nordic winter […]
Call for Submissions to a Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television on Holmes Onscreen (Tentative Title)
Edited by Tom Ue, Department of English, University College London Heralded by The Telegraph as a “global phenomenon,” BBC’s Sherlock is now one of the most commercially and critically successful television series of all time. The global recognition of Sherlock, combined with the recent discovery of Arthur Berthelet’s 1916 silent […]