By Gary M. Kramer This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, held April 19-30, features 10 shorts programs curated by the esteemed Sharon Badal (an 11th program, handled entirely by ESPN, is out of festival competition). The programs this year include a strong mix of documentary and narrative shorts from 18 countries. […]
De Palma’s Raising Cain: Re-cut and Revisited
April 4, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Since the release of Noah Baumbach’s 2015 documentary on Brian De Palma, the legendary filmmaker, who has for decades enjoyed a proud and vocal group of supporters, has become a grand cause célèbre for hip cinephiles eager to look back at even his most widely maligned films […]
A Forgotten Country’s Forgotten Cinema: Searching for Hope in Post-Soviet Moldovan Cinema
March 24, 2017
By Brandon Konecny. It has been suggested, sometimes by Moldovan film professionals themselves, that cinema does not currently exist in the Republic of Moldova, Europe’s poorest and perhaps least known country. At first blush, we might feel inclined to accept this assertion. After all, Moldova’s cinema was virtually nonexistent in […]
The Controversy of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Nasser’s Republic, The Making of Modern Egypt
March 22, 2017
By Neila Driss. Michal Goldman’s documentary, Nasser’s Republic, The Making of Modern Egypt (2016), was screened on November 20th during the 38th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF). Criticized by some viewers for historical inaccuracies, it got a stormy reception, and Goldman herself was in attendance to field […]
Kentucky Fried Chicken in the Moonlight
By Orville Lloyd Douglas. Black people are still mentally enslaved; even in the 21st century there is a psychic need by some Black artists to seek white approval and acceptance. The universal acclaim of the independent film Moonlight is due to white film critics, most heterosexual. Black films are made […]
Lars-Martin Sorenson’s Censorship of Japanese Films during the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa
A Book Review by Matthew Fullerton. Lars-Martin Sorenson is probably best known to cinephiles for his interview on censorship during the American occupation of Japan, which accompanies Criterion’s 2007 release of Drunken Angel (1948). At the time, he had just completed his PhD, and Censorship of Japanese Films during the […]
The New Southern Gothic: Loving, Jeff Nichols, and the Southern Artist in the 21st Century
By Will Tomford. As I watched Loving come to an end, I thought to myself, please don’t have an epilogue text. An artistic director like Jeff Nichols wouldn’t need to end a film with anyting but an ambiguous shot. But to my dissapointment, there it was: the what-happened-next. Maybe this […]
Cat People: Horror, Necessity, and Creative Collaboration
January 13, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Who gets the credit for Cat People (1942)? Is it first-time producer Val Lewton, who though generally overlooked in his day has since received considerable reappraisal for his innovative, low-budget ingenuity? Or is it director Jacques Tourneur, the French emigre who would bring a shadowy visual flair […]
Liverpool Radical Film Festival 2016
By Anthony Killick. The election of Donald Trump is the latest occurrence signalling neoliberalism’s transformation into some form of neo-authoritarianism constituted by a renewed commitment to upholding corporate interests and a frightful endorsement of racism and misogyny. How should those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of film culture […]
Blind Chance: Free Will in 4D?
November 8, 2016
By William Repass. In Kieślowski’s 1981[1] metaphysical/political triptych, Blind Chance, the subtlest of details cut across three alternate storylines to triangulate a Poland on the verge of Solidarity. Take, for example, which drink the protagonist Witek (Bogusław Linda) favors in each divergence following the train station scene—a hinge, as it […]