Interview

By Gary M. Kramer. Like Julien (Laurent Lafitte), the younger computer instructor, who tells Caroline (Fanny Ardant) the older woman he is romantically involved with that he is a diversion, Bright Days Ahead, co-written and directed by Marion Vernoux is a diverting film. Caroline, a retired dentist, takes some classes […]

  By Paul Risker. We need to celebrate the documentary Salma (2013) as a story of survival. Imprisoned by her family, the famous Tamil poet and activist Salma was forced to marry and denied education. Told largely through the written word, the film depicts her use of poetry writing for […]

By Gary M. Kramer. The Bachelor Weekend is a genial Irish comedy about a groom named Fionnan (Hugh O’Conor), his best man Davin (Andrew Scott), and the quartet of other men taking to the great outdoors for a Stag party. The guests include Fionnan’s gay brother Kevin (Michael Legge) and […]

By Anna Weinstein. Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet has directed ten features and three documentaries in the past twenty-five years. Perhaps best known for her award-winning films My Life Without Me (2003) and The Secret Life of Words (2005) starring Sarah Polley, Coixet also directed Elegy (2008) with Ben Kingsley, Penélope […]

By Anna Weinstein. Oscar-winning Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier has directed fifteen films since 1991. Her film Brothers (2004) inspired the 2009 U.S. remake starring Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey Maguire, and her film After the Wedding (2006) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. Things We Lost […]

By Gary M. Kramer. Sharon Badal is the shorts film curator for the Tribeca Film Festival. This year, she received a record-breaking 3,074 submissions. “We broke 3,000 for the first time!” she announced buoyantly in a recent Skype session. The Festival is showcasing 57 shorts from 16 countries in 9 […]

By Paul Risker. In 2011 Mark Cousins became film journalism’s Odysseus when he concluded his six-year journey to tell the story of film across sixteen hours. The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) stands as a seminal documentary on the subject of cinema. One might have thought the logical progression […]

By Paul Risker. Caradog James’ sophomore feature, the science-fiction drama The Machine (2013), shares its genre sibling’s habitual tendency to hypothesise and present visions of the future. In keeping with its parental heritage, The Machine offers a bleak vision that merges the future of tomorrow with yesterday’s past. It takes the present-day […]

By Michael T. Toole. Victor Salva has long had a popular career in the horror genre with titles such as Clownhouse (1989) and the Jeepers Creepers franchise (beginning in 2001, with Part III in the works). His latest offering, Dark House, mines some known territory of the eternal (and essential) battle of good and evil. If you’ve […]

By Noah Charney. February saw the release of a new, highly-acclaimed documentary film called The Rise and Fall of Penn Station, about the sadly-demolished, once-magnificent architectural wonder of a train station in the heart of Manhattan, one that made Grand Central Terminal look pale in comparison. Michael Rossi was a […]