Review

By Elias Savada. Listen, I have three vices. Movies. Craft beer. And genealogy. Shortly after Justin Lerner’s second feature, The Automatic Hate, begins, there’s an uncomfortable meeting between socially awkward Alexis Green (Adelaide Clemens), an amateur stalker, and Davis Green (Joseph Cross), a bearded chef for a casually refined Italian café […]

By Paul Risker. Alain Resnais and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) – two names forever locked in an embrace; the latter a defining and resounding heartbeat within the filmmaker’s cinema. Alongside Last Year in Marienbed (1961), Resnais was the creator of cinematic or narrative labyrinths that liberated filmic storytelling, and furthered attention […]

By Elias Savada. Disaster movies are a dime a dozen here in the United States. Catastrophes (usually) are Hollywood’s bread-and-butter…and your buttered popcorn. Now, head across the pond to Norway and you’ll — until now, never — have seen such large-scale destruction in a film, where the industry is known for […]

By Elias Savada. Doused with a familiar, filial melancholy, A Country Called Home is a bittersweet tale of a 25-year-old woman coming to grips with the ghosts in her estranged family’s closet. Music video helmer Anna Axster directed, co-wrote (with Jim Beggarly) and was a producer on her low budget, slow-cooking […]

By Elias Savada. The nightmare that surrounds the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East has never been an easy one to suppress. It’s been one step forward, two steps back for too long. A peaceful solution seems distant to proponents of the competing ideologies. Or to just the plain bystander. Colliding […]

by John Duncan Talbird. At the midpoint of Isao Takahata’s animated Only Yesterday (1991) narrator-protagonist Taeko gives us a lesson on the making of rouge: on the picking of the safflower, on its pounding to mush, on its drying in the sun in little discs. She tells us of the […]

By Elias Savada. Dark is another day (and night) in the life of a West Virginny girl in the Big City. It begins with a lesbian couple au naturel yet, also, oh so much in despair. Their lovemaking could be interpreted as break-up sex (at least for one of them). […]

By Elias Savada. In a world forever at war, Denmark doesn’t float to the top of the list as a country promoting military involvement in remote venues. Interventions have been few and far between since World War II, with its percentage of defense expenditures generally sliding over the last 60 years […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. I must admit that I approached this book with hesitation. Although the author has edited excellent interviews with blacklist victims and screenwriters from Hollywood’s Golden Age to the 1990s, his biographies have sometimes tended to go into National Enquirer territory distracting from a more […]

By William Repass.  “You’re dirty. You’re beautiful.” “What is it that the gora Englishman always needs? Clean clothes!” In the world of Stephen Frears’ and Hanif Kureishi’s 1985 cult classic, My Beautiful Laundrette—a world meant to recreate, in-miniature, a South London turned upside down by Thatcherism—cleanliness is not only a […]