By Cleaver Patterson. Is it done intentionally? Are film festival programmers that creative? Well, assuming they are, those behind 2016’s FrightFest clearly put quite some thought into the films showing at the Vue cinema in Shepherds Bush, West London, over the recent August Bank Holiday weekend. Though the films showing […]
The Other Europe is Far Away: Igor Cobileanski’s Eastern Business
November 1, 2016
By Brandon Konecny. After scamming some passersby for lunch money, Marian and Petro sit in a tiny restaurant in the Republic of Moldova, Europe’s poorest country. Petro devours the food arrayed on their table while Marian sits with his eyes fixed on the floor. Marian interrupts Petro’s unremitting chewing when […]
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016)
October 19, 2016
By Mark James. Most of us probably remember John Berger as the host of Ways of Seeing, a four-part 1972 television series that he created for BBC where Berger educated the nation about looking at art, effectively demonstrating that one can discuss the so called ‘Old Masters’ in ways that […]
The New World: Exploring the Developing Territory of Terrence Malick
October 4, 2016
By Jeremy Carr. During post-production on The New World (2005), director Terrence Malick said it would be the last time he made a movie with a plot. Given the film’s free-form audio-visual flow and its loose narrative construct, the statement was met with some amusement. Plot though there may be, […]
“Culture Has No Borders”: Ibrahim Letaief and The Carthage Film Festival
October 2, 2016
By Matthew Fullerton. Conceived in 1966 by legendary Tunisian film critic Tahar Cheriâa (1927-2010) to bring together Arab and African cinema, the Carthage Film Festival (JCC) has always had a reputation for breaking taboos: In its fifty years of existence, it has been a platform for filmmakers to question, confront […]
The 2016 New York Film Festival
October 1, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer. The 54th New York Film Festival showcases more than one hundred features, shorts, documentaries and experimental films September 30 – October 15. Many of the titles are the latest films by some of the biggest names in world cinema—Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Paul Verhoeven, and Ang […]
The 2016 New York Film Festival Shorts Program
September 28, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer. The New York Film Festival offers a range of fascinating short films, in five programs that showcase narrative shorts, international auteurs, genre stories, New York stories, and documentaries. The Narrative program is a mixed bag. The dark comedy Be Good for Rachel has Rachel (writer Rachel Sondag) […]
The Social Misfits of Kikujiro
September 19, 2016
By Yun-hua Chen. Made by Takeshi Kitano in 1999 and having entered the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, Kikujiro was subsequently remade into a Tamil-Indian film Nandala (2010) by Myshkin. After more than one and a half decades, it still seems timeless both in terms of aesthetics and […]
The Law of Capital: The Measure of a Man
September 11, 2016
By Sérgio Dias Branco. Thierry Taugourdeau, factory worker, was fired along with more than 750 of his colleagues. He is 51 years old and has been unemployed for almost two. In the first scene of The Measure of a Man (La Loi du marché, 2015; “The Law of the Market” in […]
BFI London Film Festival 2016 – Programme Launch
September 6, 2016
By Cleaver Patterson. You can always tell summer has come to an end and autumn is on the way when the BFI holds the programme launch for its annual celluloid viewing extravaganza which is the BFI London Film Festival. Going by the film trailers—which played to the assembled press at […]