Review

A Book Review by Tony Williams. This book falls into the now familiar category of Cityscape Studies but focuses on representations of Berlin from the period of Walter Ruttmann’s well-known documentary Berlin – Symphony of a Great City (1927) to more recent depictions of a landscape that has been drastically […]

By Elias Savada. The ominous hum of unease that saturates Swiss-born director Michael Krummenacher’s effective yet derivative German thriller Sibylle – being sold worldwide under the title Like a Cast Shadow – sounds distinctly familiar. Is it a doppelganger? A transference tale? A journey-into-madness melodrama? Take your pick. You might see pieces […]

By Elias Savada. Spiritual and haunting in its low decibel manner, the New England coming-of-age drama Neptune is an indie effort that follows a young teenager’s soul-searching excursion along a disconcerting and sometimes allegorical path. The film is a proudly-shot-in-Maine effort from Portland filmmaker Derek Kimball, making a solid, passionate feature […]

By Elias Savada. A semi-creepy opening sequence for director-writer Benjamin Meyer’s micro-budget feature directorial debut Fools had me wondering whether stalking can be an acceptable dating platform. Two people exchange glances and touch hands on a passenger pole aboard a Chicago El train. He moves his grasp higher. Her hand follows. […]

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 […]