By James Teitelbaum. The pivotal moment in Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman comes at the end of the first act, when the titular Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) strides into a forest surrounding the modernist estate inhabited by Marina (Hadewych Minis) and her husband Richard (Jeroen Perceval). After taunting the violent Richard […]
The Epic of Everest: Closing the Gap Between Man and the Impossibly Distant
July 16, 2014
By Axel Andersson. An epic of Everest? The heroics of nature? John Noel’s remarkable 1924 documentary, expertly restored by the BFI with a new evocative score by Simon Fisher Turner, encapsulates the most paradoxical of Romantic tropes. The mountain, Everest, is for sure present—a forbidding thing to be conquered. But it […]
The Art of the Steal: Joyous, Clever, and Fun
July 11, 2014
By Noah Charney. The first compliment I will pay to the new art heist movie, The Art of the Steal (2013), written and directed by Jonathan Sobol, is that it did not annoy me. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but I’ve got a good deal more praise […]
Sorcerer (1977)
July 9, 2014
By William Repass. “You think they pay you to drive? They pay you to be terrified. That’s your division of labor.” –The Wages of Fear (1953) Let’s not overlook the attendant division, that of leisure. Supposing, for example, you’d rather pay to be terrified. In that case look no further than […]
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Peckinpah the Dramatist
July 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. The label “master of violence” was long ago affixed to director Sam Peckinpah. Books on Peckinpah with titles like “Bloody Sam,” and studies comparing the director’s films to Kubrick’s icy-cold vision in A Clockwork Orange, insist that we separate uses of violence – an element of drama […]
Seeing Your Doppelganger Can Only Spell Trouble: Enemy (2013)
July 3, 2014
By Janine Gericke. Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy opens with a quote from José Saramago’s novel The Double, which Enemy is loosely based on, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” Well, that peaked my interest. College history professor, Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads a normal, yet fairly mundane, life. He spends his days […]
AFI Docs Film Festival 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. For the second year, AFI Docs showcased non-fiction shorts and features at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD, and at various Washington, D.C. venues. The festival was bookended with celebrity portraits, as director Scott Teem’s Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey opened the festival and Steve […]
The Good Neighbour (2013)
July 1, 2014
By Sam Littman. Not one element of Astrid Schau-Larsen’s documentary The Good Neighbour is superfluous. For this and many tangential reasons alone it is appreciable; the 58-minute investigative effort principally concerned with relaying information and opinions as concisely as possible is satisfied with its borderline feature-length running time, sustains an acute focus […]
Multicultural Middle-earth: Constructing “Home” and the Post-colonial Imaginary in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
June 30, 2014
By Laura Crossley. “The nation of course is not a desiring person but a fictive unity imposed on an aggregate of individuals, yet national histories are presented as if they displayed the continuity of the subject-writ-large.” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 101) When writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien […]
Cinema that Goes to Eleven: Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s Heavy Metal Movies (2014)
June 27, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Let all metalheads throw up their devilhorns in celebration—Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s blood-soaked, guitar-churning anthology Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos, & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! is finally here, arriving from the hellish depths of […]