Features

    By Matthew Gumpert. “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” (Roger “Verbal” Kint, The Usual Suspects [1995])     The Oz Effect   The 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts (directed by Don Chaffey), a Hollywood version of the Hellenistic epic, […]

By Jacob Mertens, Honorable Mention in the 2010 Frank Capra Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Criticism. There was a moment in my life when movies became an obsession. When I was much younger, I watched films with a casual interest. I felt the same indiscriminate, escapist rush from plunging […]

By Saër Maty Bâ. INTRODUCTION If ‘race’ is dead, the circumstances of its passing must be examined, its funeral organised and – without assumption, endorsement or dismissal – new critical, post-racial processes triggered and affected. Why is ‘post-race’ still an imprecise discourse? Could end-of-‘race’ be a tool for reading (racial) […]

By Gary McMahon. What has no power, no money, and can bite your fucking head off? Find out by downloading this pdf:  oN_thE_eDGe[1]. [This piece was originally published in b/w in Film International 43, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010. Here is the full colour version.] Share

By Linda Hutcheson. ‘Incredibly, in many European countries, the attitude still exists that a good film shouldn’t really have to be marketed at all, that the public will somehow instinctively find and appreciate artistic quality without the assistance of a vulgar marketing campaign.’ (Puttnam 1997: 314, emphasis in the original) […]

By Deborah Allison. Back in 1928, Herbert C. McKay wrote a filmmaking manual which offered the following advice: ‘The main title group with the first title may be made as elaborate as one desires as few spectators stop to read them anyway aside from the simple title of the film’ […]

By Raphaël Lambert. Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 novella Tamango is a simple case of a biter being bit: Tamango, an African slave dealer, is captured along with the people he has just sold to a French captain. Once in the hold of the slave ship with his former victims and now […]

By Michael Tapper. When thinking about Robin Wood, his book Personal Viewsalways comes to mind. He published it in 1976 – a transitional period between what he called his life as ‘an ideal bourgeois man’ and his coming out as a gay, feminist and socialist in his manifesto ‘Responsibilities of […]

By Robin Wood. This article discusses (ultimately!) two films about the founding of modern Israel: Otto Preminger’s Exodus(Hollywood, 1960), and Gitai’s Kedma(2002). Both titles are also the names of the ships from which the Israelis land in Palestine – legally, in Exodus, illegally (by just four days!) in Kedma. It […]

By Robin Wood. Auditionstands apart from the rest of Miike Takashi’s other films to date: this seems to be the general consensus, and it is confirmed by the three other films by him I have seen. It is the only one of the four that interests – more than interests, […]