Interview

By Amir Ganjavie. The brutal war that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the hatred between Serbs and Croats have provided material for many Balkan filmmakers. Dalibor Matanic’s The High Sun, a fresh take on the subject from Croatia, is the first film from that country to participate at Cannes since 1991, […]

By Noah Charney. The first annual Kopedia Comedy Festival, held in the peaceful coastal town of Koper, Slovenia, a hybrid Italian-Germanic-Slavic port on the Adriatic, featured a special guest who, at least by Slovene standards, qualified as extremely exotic. Sharon Gan is a Malaysian producer, and had brought with her […]

By Paul Risker. The European continent shares an intimate connection to the detective archetype. Nordic shows The Killing (2007-2012), The Bridge (2011-) and Wallander (2005-2013), alongside the French double bill of Braquo (2009-2014) and Spiral (2005-) as well as Italy’s Inspector Montalbano (1999-2013) have over the past decade or so […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Veteran actor Joe Mantegna has all the wisdom that a life before the camera could provide. And yet he possesses an innocence long lost by most in his cadre. Looking back on a varied acting career – “I’ve done it all” from him sounds completely factual and […]

By Paul Risker. Argentine pianist Martha Argerich has always represented a swirling musical force – her performance of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.3 in particular having left me astounded and inclined to perceive her as a godlike force of artistic expression. I have heard whispers of the woman behind Argerich […]

By Paul Risker.  There are those projects that stand out in stark contrast to what has gone before, which engulf the individuals involved. 1864 (2014) is one of those moments, and as the young Danish actress Marie Tourell Søderberg, who stars in the epic war drama, explains: “This is by […]

By Matthew Sorrento. The “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller needs no introduction. Over the past two decades, he has become what we could describe as a public intellectual for golden age cinema. If not the scholar of film noir that Foster Hirsch or James Naremore may be, Muller has offered […]

By Paul Risker. Anarchy Parlor (2015) is the directorial debut for Kenny Gage and Devon Downs, who along with co-directing this Lithuanian-set horror, together co-wrote the picture. Whether Anarchy Parlor will follow in the footsteps of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and hurt the Lithuanian tourist trade, for what would certainly […]

By Paul Risker. The magical touch of film editing, seen and yet often unacknowledged, is similar to putting a jigsaw puzzle together to create a narrative and aesthetic flow between the multitude of shots and scenes. Emerging from the confined and hidden space of the editing room, Snow in Paradise […]

By Jude Warne. Sandy McLeod is more than familiar with the art of documentary filmmaking. After all, she has worked with the great Jonathan Demme on the 1984 Talking Heads classic Stop Making Sense and the 1987 television documentary Haiti: Dreams of Democracy. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her 2003 […]