By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Mark Rutland: “What do you believe in?” Marnie Edgar: “Nothing.” (From Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie) Alfred Hitchcock is routinely regarded as one of the most profound and technically adept directors in the history of cinema, but I would argue that only the latter half of that statement […]
Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse
Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse: A new book by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. The culture of twenty-first century America largely revolves around narcissistic death, violence, and visions of doom. As people are bombarded with amoral metanarratives that display an almost complete lack of empathy for others on television, […]
Throne of Blood: An Ethereal Play of Light and Shadow
June 3, 2014
By William Repass. Wind and mist over hills that turn out to be ruins. A funereal sutra chanted over the soundtrack. Beside a cluster of graves, the rough-hewn marker reads: “Here Stood Spider Web Castle.” These opening shots yield enough story material to piece together not only the outcome of everything […]
Bottled Up: The Treacherous Terrain of Poverty, Family, and Love
June 1, 2014
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Indie directors love to mix genres in order to introduce us to fairly realistic characters, unusual stories and fresh narrative strategies. Enid Zentelis effectively mixes elements of serious drama, romantic comedy, and discomforting black comedic elements of the horror film in her low-budget gem, Bottled Up […]
The 57th San Francisco International Film Festival
May 28, 2014
By Mark James. The San Francisco International Film Festival, which ran April 24 through May 8th of this year, is true to its name in that its greatest strength has always been its international slate of movies. This year, the Festival’s 57th (remember it is the longest running Festival in […]
Bullet Ballet: An Existentialist Journey through Shibuya
May 27, 2014
By Giuseppe Sedia. To certain a degree Bullet Ballet (1998) represents a dividing line in Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cinematic career that shifted once and for all from film to digital after he entered into his forties. This was certainly a distressing but inevitable transition for the cineaste whose cult arose thanks […]
Child’s Pose: The Limits of the Awful Mother
May 26, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster offers on this site a larger account of Călin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose than what follows here. I saw a Region 1 DVD of this film; it is impressive in many respects, yet not as accomplished, to my mind, as some of the exemplary […]
Tribeca 2014 Festival Report
May 23, 2014
By Michael Miller. At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival several films—both narrative features and documentaries—probed the theme of masculinity from different perspectives. In the buddy film Land Ho! (directed by Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz), Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) and Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) are two retired guys each trying to make […]
Yes, but it’s not cinema
May 20, 2014
By James Knight. It’s been thirty-two years since Wim Wenders shot Room 666 in a hotel room at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. What concerned Wenders at the time was the future state of cinema, and primarily, cinema’s relationship with television. The film featured several well-known directors alone in a […]
Oskar Fischinger 1900-1967: Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction (2013)
May 20, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. It’s a shame that Oskar Fischinger hasn’t found his way into more literature on avant-garde cinema. Apart from the late William Moritz’s immaculately researched Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (2004), he remains a figure who’s often referenced along with a […]