Review

By Zhuo-Ning Su.  When No (2012) took the festival circuit by storm and eventually won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination some years back, there were probably a handful of us who remained unconvinced or even slightly mystified. The historical drama about the ad campaign that brought down Pinochet’s military […]

By Paul Risker. From its opening breath, Nina Forever feels like a film that appeals not solely to our superficial and aesthetic gaze, but to our instincts. The opening sounds of a crash and the flashes of light that have become ingrained and associated with accidental tragedy offer a haunting presence. […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su.  Calling German writer/director Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria the runaway sensation at this year’s Berlin Film Festival is overstating it a little bit, considering how critical response to the film was not nearly as unanimously amorous as to, say, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi or Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years. That said, if […]

By Jeremy Carr. Bruno Cortona (Vittorio Gassman) zips along deserted Roman streets in his Lancia Aurelia B24. In search of a telephone, he is a high-speed automotive speck dwarfed by towering housing complexes and businesses. Bruno maintains this frenetic pace whether he’s on foot, in his car, or speaking. He […]

By Matthew Sorrento. In his essay “A Spanner in the Works?: Genre, Narrative and the Hollywood Comedian,” Frank Krutnik details how classical Hollywood comedies were built around a star comedian. Designed to showcase the talents of the star, these vehicles present him/her as a fish-out-water, to provide comic bits, and then […]

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny.  With a fascinating lineage spanning from the Treaty of Waitangi to the inception of the first ever state-funded Indigenous television station, New Zealand has proven itself a veritable incubator of the growing intersection between Indigeneity and media. It is therefore appropriate that editors Brendan […]

By Jacob Mertens. In an early sequence in Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, a group of girls walk home at night after a football game, weaving through featureless concrete high rises. One by one, each girl peels off from group as they reach their home until only Marieme (Karidja Touré) remains. In […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Don Carpenter killed himself in 1995. He was a writer’s writer, never famous for the ten or so novels, dozens of stories, or screenplays he wrote and published from the sixties to the late eighties. In the 1960s, when he was first publishing and […]

By Jude Warne.  On April 8th 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, it was announced that Serge Bourguignon’s film Sundays and Cybèle had won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Fifty-one years later, Criterion has re-released Bourguignon’s Oscar winner in a remarkably satisfying Blu-ray package that showcases […]

By Jacob Mertens.  Ramin Bahrani—known in the indie festival circuit for his subtle, observational features Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007), and Goodbye Solo (2008)—enters the current festival year with a film that pushes past the scope of the individual and toward grand meaning. Specifically, he seizes on the […]