Review

By Devapriya Sanyal. Beginning in 2012, the Indian film audience has been treated on and off to a number of excellent biopics – the topics being covered in these films varying greatly, both in terms of subject matter as well as treatment. Ketan Mehta’s Manjhi: The Mountain Man is one […]

By Elias Savada. Aviva Kempner has struck again. A Jewish liberal landmark in Washington for many decades, she has forged a multi-faceted career that includes making documentaries that focus on people and events Jewish. The Washington Jewish Film Festival was started by Kempner in 1990 (she’s still on its advisory […]

By Elias Savada. The more you laugh at David Gold, the more you want to smack him on the side of his loopy head. He’s the central character in Guidance — the feature debut from Canadian writer-director Pat Mills (who also stars) — and the world is his Goliath. His […]

By Cleaver Patterson. It sounds odd that the screening for a film which is not primarily horror – at least in the generally accepted sense of the word – was the first to sell out at a festival dedicated to the genre.  However that’s just what happened when tickets for […]

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 […]