By William Repass. Newton’s Third Law does not hold sway in Argentine filmmaker Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes, 2014). On the contrary, action leads only to overreaction, effect revenging itself on cause. Each of the six thematically interlocking shorts that comprise the film advances by means of escalation. In […]
Big Game (2015): Hi/Low Concept
June 28, 2015
By Elias Savada. If Oskari Kontio, the cautious, newly-minted 13-year-old boy that is half of the unusual buddy team in Big Game, were Jewish, he’s having one heck of a Bar Mitzvah day. Theme: Wilderness Action Adventure on wry. Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander, in his English-language feature debut, is throwing […]
Slow Coen-esque West
June 27, 2015
By Elias Savada. John Ford’s nowhere to be found. Stagecoach (1939) has left the building. There’s also no widescreen, large-ensemble-driven Silverado (1985) on the golden western horizon. Slow West is the latest film that tries to reinvent a genre that has died off more times than John Wayne can remember. And he’s […]
Call Me Lucky: Bobcat, Crimmins, and American Culture
June 26, 2015
By Paul Risker. I was fortunate enough a few years back now to be in the opening night audience when Bobcat Goldthwait opened proceedings at the 14th installment of Film4 FrightFest. The electricity that he can radiate from that place upon the stage is a remarkable feat. Although I had the […]
Seeking the Intimate in The Overnight
June 25, 2015
By Paul Risker. Film cannot escape the inevitable measure of its worth – how close the pendulum of critical and spectatorial judgment swings towards success or failure. For some, the box office gross is the measure of success, while for others the subjective uncertainty of creative merit or the satisfying […]
PIXAR Goes Inside Out on Us
June 24, 2015
By Elias Savada. What’s PIXAR gonna dream up next? Something about singing taste buds, perhaps? How out this for a ticklish tale of palace intrigue: Spicy Salsa (Sofia Vergara), Dour Sour (Jim Parsons), Mr. Salty (Kevin Spacey), and Grace Bitter (Melissa McCarthy) band together in a scrumptious comedy about a […]
The Real Harry Lime: A Restoration of The Third Man (1949)
June 22, 2015
By John Duncan Talbird. What matters in that kind of role is not how many lines you have, but how few. What counts is how much the other characters talk about you. Such a star vehicle really is a vehicle. All you have to do is ride. —from This Is […]
The Wolfpack (2015): Too Close to Home
June 20, 2015
By Elias Savada. Here’s a thought. Flip through the opening lines of an imagined screenplay for The Wolfpack…. It’s dusk. The Empire State Building centers the landscape, but a chain link boundary obscures the view. It’s a prison metaphor, and the film’s principals, the brothers of this stranger-than-fiction tale, liken […]
Content and Technique in Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns
June 19, 2015
By James Knight. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), Jean-Paul Belmundo turns to man at a party and says, “you seem to be alone.” The man is of course Samuel Fuller, the writer and director of Forty Guns (1957). Via a translator Belmundo then asks Fuller what exactly cinema is, […]
The Trials and Tribulations of The Three Hikers (2015)
June 19, 2015
By Elias Savada. World premiering as part of the Washington Post Film Strand at this year’s AFI DOCS is The Three Hikers, the freshman feature from rookie director Natalie Avital, an actress known or unknown for appearances in dozens of short subjects, supporting roles in the slow-burn horror entry Shallow […]