Interview

By Amir Ganjavie and Leila Pasandideh. It has been a few weeks since Kianoosh Ayari’s Paternal House (2012) was banned from screening, for the second time. At first banned after its premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival by the Iranian government agency that funded the project, the film went back under Ayari’s control when he received approval to screen the […]

By Jude Warne. Bernard Rose is a firm believer of the interrelations of film and music. Music always seems to have been central to his approach to cinematic style. Rose got his start in filmmaking directing music videos such as UB40’s 1983 hit “Red Red Wine” and Frankie Goes to […]

By Matthew Sorrento. John Boorman’s status as a major filmmaker was sealed with five words from Lee Marvin: “I defer those to John.” The actor then left the room, which contained Boorman and the producers of Point Blank (1967); they had just conferred that Marvin had approval over the script and […]

By Paul Risker. From the pages of Alan Smith’s Here Be Monsters! (2005) Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi release the Boxtroll creatures from the stillness of the page and set them loose to roam the big (and small) screen. When I spoke with Annable and Stacchi I discovered two humble […]

By Paul Risker. For Life Itself (2014) – a prominent snub by the Academy in the documentary category this year – filmmaker Steve James paints the landscape of a life and maturation of Roger Ebert, the man and the critic. “I wanted to get my arms around it all” explained James, “To show how the way in which he lived […]

By Amir Ganjavie and Shadi Javadi Abhari. The future of the western film genre, with its generic pattern, relation to historical narratives, and cinematic form, is a constant source of concern in cinema. Over the past couple of decades, various filmmakers, including Tommy Lee Jones (2005’s The Three Burials of […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the writers busy in print and onscreen, it’s great to see Nick Antosca having made a place for himself. With a sizable talent from the start, he began publishing fiction – novels and stories – upon finishing undergraduate work. His early speculative works, like the […]

By Paul Risker. Katharine Isabelle’s discovery of films could not have been more different than my own. My place has always been on the spectatorial side of the silver screen, whilst for the actor her encounter with film from a young age was interactive and set in motion experiences she […]

By Amir Ganjavie. Reza Mirkarimi’s Today has been selected to represent Iran at the Oscars in 2015, after the film’s recent screening at the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF). According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, “in some respects, the plot’s departure as well as the conclusion of Today may remind us the ‘first’ Iranian New Wave, Ebrahim […]

By Anna Weinstein. There are few documentaries about comic books and even fewer about women in comics. In fact, according to Marisa Stotter, the director of the new documentary She Makes Comics, her film is the first to explore women behind the “ninth art.” Stotter is a recent graduate of […]