Review

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 […]

By Elizabeth Mizon. Why, in our democracy-obsessed society, do we balk at the idea of economic democracy in our workplaces? Why do we – the majority of us wage-reliant labourers, working in organisations we have no influence in – so willingly defend and trust the capitalist business model, “the most […]

By Jude Warne.  With the recent onslaught of on-screen Sherlocks, one might wonder why a filmmaker would bring another interpretation into the mix. Why indeed. Well, with Bill Condon’s new Mr. Holmes, the why seems to be this: to present Sherlock Holmes as a regular person, i.e. a mortal human […]

By Cleaver Patterson.  In today’s age of anything goes splatterfests and in-your-face CGI, it’s perhaps hard to appreciate the full effect Tod Browning’s infamous horror classic Freaks (1932) had upon its first release. At the time, the film that was banned in many countries—it would remain unseen in Britain for […]