Review

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 […]

By Christopher Sharrett.  While watching Daniel Peddle’s very interesting Sunset Edge (2015), I couldn’t help but think of F.R. Leavis’s reaction to George Eliot’s final masterpiece Daniel Deronda (1876). He argued (very wrong-headedly) that the two “halves” of the novel didn’t cohere, and that the “Zionist half” should be cut away, leaving […]

By James Knight.  During his legendary conversation with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock remarked on the differences between feature and documentary filmmaking, stating that in documentary, god has already created all the elements for the director, whereas in feature filmmaking the director must essentially become his own god and create his […]

By Tony Williams.  Two years before the disastrous election in England that gave the Conservatives a majority to complete the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s, The Spirit of ’45 appeared theatrically. This was Loach’s documentary on the stunning 1945 General Election that put the Labour Party into power reflecting a […]