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 […]
True Tête-à-Tête: Best of Enemies (2015)
June 15, 2015
By Elias Savada. Oscar-winning (2013’s Twenty Feet From Stardom) documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, a Grammy Award winning writer, author, and filmmaker, collaborated back in 2007 on the film Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, which later (2013) became a 463-page book by Gordon. A new version […]
The Human Imperfection of The Falling
June 14, 2015
By Paul Risker. Worlds continue to merge as Carol Morley instigates an ongoing collision between narrative fiction and documentary within her young oeuvre. But with her most recent narrative fiction film The Falling (2015), this collision extends to the very fabric of the film itself. Beneath the surface of its […]
Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (2013)
June 7, 2015
A Book Review by Martin Stollery. Framing Africa is a succinct book, academic in orientation, accessible in writing style, lacking illustrations, but graced with an arresting jacket design. Across an introduction and seven chapters, all but one of them focusing on a single example, Nigel Eltringham and his contributors survey […]
Nuns on the Bus: Radical Grace (2015)
June 5, 2015
By Elias Savada. Before Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected the ultimately enlightened Pope Francis in March 2013, there were a lot of misguided steps taken on behalf of the Catholic Church by his predecessors. While the mishandling of clerical sexual abuse scandals created too many embarrassing headlines, it was the […]
San Andreas: The Empty Catastrophe
June 3, 2015
By Christopher Sharrett. “Today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Quote attributed to Fredric Jameson, or Slavoj Zizek, or J.G. Ballard, or perhaps an urban legend. “It’s quite enjoyable to watch things being destroyed, sequence after sequence of […]
Remorse in Short Supply: Peace Officer (2015)
June 1, 2015
By Elias Savada. William J. “Dub” Lawrence should not be smiling. And yet his bright teeth light up the screen in the mesmerizing, exceedingly well-structured documentary Peace Officer from Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber, a startlingly impressive first feature. His exuberant confidence disarms you, despite some dour opening remarks (“I […]
An Intriguing Population of 94: Uncertain (2015)
May 30, 2015
By Elias Savada. The new film from Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands begins like a mystery. It’s a dark night. A lone flashlight scans the Cypress trees and Irish moss of a murky lake, as insects flit about, their buzzing intensifying to an uneasy cacophony of unsettling noise. Uncertain isn’t […]