By Ali Moosavi. Pirahnas, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, is based on a novel by Roberto Saviano, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Saviano also performed this double duty on Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008). Pirahnas begins with a scene inside a deserted […]
All the Writers Dreamed They’d be Your Partner: Elaine May Writing for Warren Beatty, Director
Dean Brandum.
August 6, 2019
By Dean Brandum. The following was originally written as a chapter for inclusion in ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019, edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum). Due to space issues, however, it does not feature in the final version of the book and is thus published […]
The Mountain: A Discouraging Word
August 6, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. My subtitle is taken from a moment in Rick Alverson’s film The Mountain, where we see a black-and-white, furniture-bound TV, the type representative of the 1950s, showing Perry Como singing “Home on the Range,” a song that is close to a national anthem, and is referred to as […]
“I Don’t Know the Person You Talk About”: Ingmar Bergman’s Novels
July 30, 2019
A Book Review Essay by John Talbird. “Words flown out can’t be caught on the wing.” Supposedly, this is a saying from Martin Luther, although Google gives me no hits except for from Ingmar Bergman’s novel, The Best Intentions (1991), where it is referenced. Perhaps it’s not an accurate quote […]
Producer-Director Aldrich at a Crossroads: The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Grissom Gang (1971) from Kino Lorber
Tony Williams
July 29, 2019
A Review Essay by Tony Williams. Following the commercial success of The Dirty Dozen (1967), iconoclastic director Robert Aldrich fulfilled his dream of purchasing his own studio. As well as attempting full independence from the Hollywood studio system that he was both part of, and opposed to, the director aimed […]
Diverted Dreams: Astronaut (2019)
Jeremy Carr
July 26, 2019
By Jeremy Carr. Septuagenarian grandfather Angus (Richard Dreyfuss) has harbored dreams of space since he was a child. Although the waning years of his life have generally clouded those fancies, thanks to life’s bitter two-pronged tinge of disappointment and regret, he still looks to the stars in order to “see […]
Restoring Paul Leni – The Man Who Laughs (1928) and The Last Warning (1929) from Flicker Alley
Tony Williams
July 24, 2019
By Tony Williams. While we lament today current low standards represented by mainstream Hollywood cinema, those of us resilient enough to resist the temptations of the “new” and ignore the uneducated comments of ungrateful, social media-addicted 100-level students complaining about the fact that they have to see “old films” (despite […]
Deadites vs. Adaptation: Media and The Evil Dead
Valerie Guyant
July 18, 2019
By Valerie Guyant. The following is an excerpt from The Many Lives of The Evil Dead: Essays on the Cult Film Franchise, © 2019, Edited by Ron Riekki and Jeffrey A. Sartain by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com. Evil Dead has been adapted for different media, […]
All in the Method – Remembering British Television: Audience and Industry by Kristyn Gorton and Joanne Garde Hansen
July 9, 2019
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This recent monograph (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2019) aims to debate the importance of everyday TV memories involving academics, audiences, and fans, in terms of recent theoretical developments in the field of British television studies. It is an academic study in the full-sense of the term, one […]
Homage to Humanity: La vie de Jesus and L’Humanite (Criterion Collection)
Christopher Sharrett
June 19, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. Bruno Dumont is one of the outstanding figures of the twenty-first century’s European cinema, so the Criterion hi-definition releases of his two early films, la vie de Jesus (1997) and l’Humanite (1999), are something of a godsend. I have written at length about Dumont on this site, so I’ll […]