By Malu Halasa. Ok, Enough, Goodbye (directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia) is a movie told through archetypes. We don’t know the name of the main character but we recognise this single, 40-year-old man, still living at home with his feisty elderly mother, through his actions. He doesn’t go […]
A Behavioural Report on the Greek Crisis
By Celluloid Liberation Front. They already called it the “Greek New Wave”, “Greek Weird Wave” or even “Greek Absurdism”; it more realistically is a bunch of movies coming from the Hellenic peninsula sharing certain thematic traits. It is not the intent of this article to dispute whether Ektoras Lygizos’ film […]
Sabotaging Socialist Realism
By Celluloid Liberation Front. As part of its ‘Out of the Past’ sidebar section, the 47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has presented a digitally restored copy of Nová Vlna milestone The Firemen’s Ball by Milos Forman. Restored classics often come with an intimidating dose of self-importance and grandeur; Milos […]
Project X, or the New Teen Nihilism
By Christopher Sharrett. I have just re-screened on disc Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X (2012), which I saw in a nearby multiplex this past season. I wanted to see it again not because I feared I missed something in the plot (there is hardly any of this, nor characterization, nor any […]
Anatomy of an Enigma
By Matthew Sorrento. Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in its title alone, makes quite a promise. The most effective of its kind (taken from the best selling source novel by Robert Traver – a.k.a. Judge John D. Voelker – loosely based on a case of his), the title […]
Twice Round the Daffodils: 50th Anniversary
By Cleaver Patterson. There were three subjects British cinema excelled at during the heady days of 60’s liberalism – kitchen-sink-drama, Gothic horror and old-fashioned, feel-good humour. If director Tony Richardson’s gritty social treatise A Taste of Honey (1961) and anything produced by Hammer during their mid-decade heyday epitomised the first […]
The Deep Blue Sea: Terence Davies and the Woman’s Melodrama
By Christopher Sharrett. The woman’s melodrama has fallen on hard times, as is the case with any genre that takes its material seriously in the age of the Hollywood blockbuster. The continuing plight of women under the oppression of patriarchy simply isn’t much of a topic of interest in the […]
Private Romeo: A Conversation with Alan Brown
By Tom Ue. Writer and director Alan Brown’s most recent feature – his fourth – Private Romeo, won a Grand Jury Prize at 2011 Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles, and was a Critic’s Pick of The New York Times, which wrote that, “Shakespeare himself would spring for a ticket […]
That Hurtful Mask – in memory of Erland Josephson (1923-2012)
By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. As I watch Fanny and Alexander (1982) for the first time since childhood, I am caught not so much in the grip of Ingmar Bergman’s “cinemagic” filmmaking (which, in my opinion, is at its weakest in this particular film). Rather, I find myself in an uneasy clinch […]
Le Havre
By Celluloid Liberation Front. Outside the gentrified humanism for ‘members only’ and the gated communities of meritocracy, in the suburbs of a neglected humanity is Le Havre, the latest film by Aki Kaurismäki. When European stars could not fly yet they would sail to Hollywood from the port of Le […]