Review

By Elias Savada. Joe Swanberg apparently hasn’t stopped mumbling yet. Known for his mumblecore films — micro-budget affairs shot on video with lots of actor improvisation — Swanberg has barely inched toward making more formal movies, starting with the craft beer romance Drinking Buddies a few years back. Growing more […]

By Elias Savada. Somewhere out in the middle of America, amongst the Colorado cattle fields and its arrowhead-laden landscape, we find Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and his long-haired buddy Harrison (Hay Wellford) roaming the plains. These ten-year-olds are either innocent pioneers out for a long, extended walk or have left home […]

By Brandon Konecny.  In his foreword to William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), John Jeremiah Sullivan points out that “a fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information.” By this he means that instead of front-loading a story with character information—a charge of which a substantial amount of today’s screenwriters are guilty—a […]

By Paul Risker. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) – is it a statement or is it a question? On the one hand it is a statement and yet for any narrative literate spectator it is a question in the shell of a statement – the film an […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Since that historic evening on the 21st December 1937, when the father of the animated feature film Walt Disney unleashed the game changing force that was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs upon an unsuspecting public, the studio which bares his name has more or less dominated […]

By Elias Savada. Listen to Me Marlon, the new documentary about the controversial and complex actor Marlon Brando, follows a similar technique found in A Fuller Life, which I recently reviewed. Both use the words of its subjects to tell an absorbing tale. The Sam Fuller film has the words […]

By John Duncan Talbird. Director Daniel Augusto and screenwriter Carolina Kotscho’s biopic of the Brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho, Paulo Coelho’s Best Story, opens with the young author-to-be (Ravel Andrade) attempting suicide by gas range. Before he succumbs, he hears a rock song — a song we return to later in […]

By Paul Risker. One of the intriguing occurrences that forms part of the spectatorial experience is the point when you will silently interrogate the source of your enjoyment. Perhaps it is that the characters, the pictures and the music have touched your sensibilities on an emotional level. But sometimes there […]

By Robert Buckeye. She is from Seattle. She is from Dubuque, Dayton, Dover. She is going to San Francisco, Chicago, New York. To Paris. She will be an actress, writer, artist. She will be herself. At one point in Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013, written and directed by Gustav Deutsch), […]

By Elias Savada. Samantha Fuller watched her journalist-turned-novelist-then-screenwriter, director and occasional actor dad grow old and angry with the Hollywood studio system. Fuller fille (born in 1975 to his second wife, actress Christa Lang) appeared in small roles in two of Sam Fuller’s later efforts, including White Dog, a racism-themed […]