By Jeremy Carr. As with much of his work, especially in the last 15 years or so, one’s response to Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes (1999) was to a large degree established even before the film’s release. Coming off the commercial success of Mission: Impossible two years prior, this 1998 feature […]
Oculus: Another Look In the Haunted Mirror
April 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Oculus is a rather pretentious title for a rather straightforward movie, but despite the assembly line nature of its’ construction, the film still has something going for it. At first it’s hard to say precisely what the film has to offer, because on the surface it […]
Out of the Furnace: The Question of Adversarial Cinema
April 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. I did not see Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace during its initial run some months ago, in part because I thought little of Cooper’s Crazy Heart (2009), and anticipated, incorrectly, that the film would adapt Thomas Bell’s important (although not very distinctive) novel Out of This […]
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or, Nothing You Believe is True
April 5, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I’m teaching a class right now in comic book movies, partly to trace the history of the genre from the 1940s on – when they began as Saturday morning serials – and partly to discover, if I could, why these films have moved to the mainstream […]
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle Finally Released on DVD and Blu-ray
April 2, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Many years ago, in 1969, when I was working as a writer for Life magazine under editor Thomas Thompson, one of the highlights of my working week came on Monday, when the screening schedule of newly released films would be distributed throughout the office, and we’d […]
The Secret World of the Warrior Elites: 007, Fukuyama and Tom Jones
March 31, 2014
By Rajko Radovic. If you have a message, send it by Western Union! That was the legendary answer Hollywood bigwigs would fire at those among suspiciously mortal critics, usually foreign or pinko, who were wondering whether or not the pictures they were making had anything to say. On a certain […]
Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (2013)
March 29, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. In the introduction of his Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, published in 1989, Daniel J. Goulding writes, “Among the internationally significant national cinemas of Central and Eastern Europe, only Romania has shown little sign of renewal…At the time […]
Filming Living History: An Interview with Award-Winning TV Documentary Producer, Michael Rossi
March 27, 2014
By Noah Charney. February saw the release of a new, highly-acclaimed documentary film called The Rise and Fall of Penn Station, about the sadly-demolished, once-magnificent architectural wonder of a train station in the heart of Manhattan, one that made Grand Central Terminal look pale in comparison. Michael Rossi was a […]
Berlinale 2014 Festival Report
March 22, 2014
By Yun-hua Chen. The 64th Berlinale opened with Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, a fitting festival film that set a playful tone and brought glamour to town, thanks to which we saw the presence of Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray and Saoirse on the red carpet. In this yearly […]
Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 3
March 22, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. To Part 2. Hadewijch Hadewijch is the first of two films (the second is Hors Satan) directly focused on the pursuit of the spiritual. I should say first that the two films present a problem, since the search is embodied in Hadewijch in a hysterical young woman […]