Review

By Elias Savada. The emotional stability of five delightfully effervescent sisters is mightily tested in Mustang, a biting and anguishing indictment of conservative religious ideology set in present day northern Turkey. It’s a powerful debut feature from Deniz Gamze Ergüven, a Turkish-born cinephile educated in Paris and Johannesburg, who displays an […]

By Giuseppe Sedia.  In a certain way, Shûji Terayama never reached a point in his career when he felt the need to retrace his childhood. More truly, his multidisciplinary body of work, taken as whole, can be considered as an uninterrupted meditation on his past. Nevertheless, the Japanese cineaste never adopted a […]

By Sotiris Petridis. Filmmaker Mark Hartley’s (2008’s Not Quite Hollywood, 2010’s Machete Maidens Unleashed!) latest delightful chronicle of B-movie splendor, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, spotlights the story of a production company run by two eccentric Israeli cousins, Menahem Golan (1929-2014) and Yoram Globus (1941- ). Created in 1967 […]

By Elias Savada. “Anything can be turned into anything.” So says scruffy, droopy-eyed musician/music producer Nick Koenig, the eponymous subject of writer-producer-director Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary Hot Sugar’s Cold World. Grammy-nominated Koenig, a.k.a. Hot Sugar, and composing as Nick Koenig-Dzialowski likes to think outside the box, pushing his digital recording devices […]

By Elias Savada. Mention the words “subprime mortgage” and people start dozing, or leave the room. Hey, you! Yes, you! Wake up. And your friend, get him back in here! Because both of you, my favorite readers, really want to learn about the fine new educational and entertaining film from Adam […]

By Paul Risker. Stories as in life have no true beginning, middle or end. Rather they are just a series of events running together like a never-ending piece of string that creates the linear structure of time. It is perhaps within the individual chapters that a beginning, a middle and […]

By Jude Warne. “What is the good of all this progress? By overcoming distance we overcome difference.” True – it seems likely that the only route to world peace is the route that points straight ahead – or if not straight, then at least ahead. Because it is most definitely not […]

By Elias Savada. I was ready to give up on Spike Lee after suffering through Red Hook Summer, his 2012 scattershot meditation on the director’s beloved Brooklyn. Lo and behold, the joint man is back in fine iambic pentameter form with the latest adaptation of the ancient Greek dramedy Lysistrata by […]

By Elias Savada. It’s interesting that novelist-screenwriter-producer Nick Hornby and director John Crowley previously have been best known in the world of cinema for their boyish works. Hornby wrote the charming novel About a Boy (1998), which became an award-winning comedy film in 2002 that introduced us to rising star […]