By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Now that some time has elapsed between the Sony hack and the release of the film that apparently precipitated it, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Interview (2014), there are more than a few lessons to take away from the entire affair not only in the […]
Elia Kazan’s Boomerang!: A Film of Qualified Pleasures
January 4, 2015
By Chris Neilan. Between 1945 and 1957 Greek born Elia Kazantzoglou had no directorial equal in Hollywood. The films he made in that period were nominated for fifty Oscars, twelve of those for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and launched the careers of Marlon Brando and James Dean. It was […]
The Best of 2014 – and the Most Overrated
By Film International. Another film year has come to an end and it’s time to sum up. Here are the films that some of the current and former members of the Film International editorial team particularly liked this year. And those that we found particularly – annoyingly – overrated. As […]
The 58th BFI London Film Festival
December 30, 2014
By Cleaver Patterson. Since its inception the BFI London Film Festival has – like the city which hosts it – prided itself in its ability to combine quirkiness with broad appeal. The result has always been an original and eclectic mix of films as seen in those shown in this […]
Tati Time: Criterion Delivers The Complete Jacques Tati
December 28, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. Aside from his general lack of recognition as one of film history’s great comedians, the most tragic part of Jacques Tati’s working life is his minimal output (indeed the two are probably connected). On the positive side of things though, while Tati directed just six feature films, […]
Whiplash and the Deathliness of Co-opted Jazz
December 21, 2014
By William Repass. In Damien Chazelle’s new film Whiplash (2014), aspiring jazz drummer and conservatory freshman Andrew (Miles Teller) and his father (Paul Reiser) meet at the cinema to enact their moviegoing father-son ritual. Both characters are white. Andrew buys a bucket of popcorn and a box of Raisinets from […]
Viennale 2014 Festival Report
December 20, 2014
By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale 2014 continues with its good tradition of being an audience-friendly film festival, with a wide range of discussion panels, art installations, events and parties open to the public. There are tributes to Viggo Mortensen and Harun Farocki. The latter’s earlier films, which are difficult to watch […]
“A Giant Gutter in Outer Space”: On the Schopenhauerian Themes of HBO’s hit series True Detective
By Mathijs Peters. Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which Samuel Beckett defined as “an intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted” (Büttner 2002: 115), has perhaps had a more profound and long-lasting influence on artists than on philosophers. Even though his thought played an extremely important […]
Cinefest 2014: The Eleventh International Festival of German Film Heritage
December 14, 2014
By Brenda Benthien. Cinefest, Hamburg’s international festival of German film history, focused this year on New Directions in Documentary Film. A range of volatile films from the 1960s through the 1980s illustrated how social upheaval and new technologies began to empower documentary filmmakers working to counter mainstream media. Since 1988, […]
The One I Love: Another Film Lost in The Cosmos
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godard called his masterwork Weekend (1967) “a film lost in the cosmos – a film found on the scrapheap” in that movie’s intertitles, but at least it opened in a theater in New York, played there for months, and then made the rounds on the university […]