Review

By Chris Neilan.  Between 1945 and 1957 Greek born Elia Kazantzoglou had no directorial equal in Hollywood. The films he made in that period were nominated for fifty Oscars, twelve of those for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and launched the careers of Marlon Brando and James Dean. It was […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In his 1968 study The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, Andrew Sarris wrote that Samuel Fuller was an “authentic American primitive,” to mean, I assume, that Fuller, like primitive painters, was untrained. It’s true that Fuller didn’t work his way up on the set […]

By William Repass.  In Damien Chazelle’s new film Whiplash (2014), aspiring jazz drummer and conservatory freshman Andrew (Miles Teller) and his father (Paul Reiser) meet at the cinema to enact their moviegoing father-son ritual. Both characters are white. Andrew buys a bucket of popcorn and a box of Raisinets from […]

By James Teitelbaum. Near the end of The Missing Picture, director Rithy Panh’s grim memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia, we see a clay figure representing a middle-aged Panh in repose within a detailed diorama of a psychiatrist’s office. This of course is a reminder […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godard called his masterwork Weekend (1967) “a film lost in the cosmos – a film found on the scrapheap” in that movie’s intertitles, but at least it opened in a theater in New York, played there for months, and then made the rounds on the university […]

By John Duncan Talbird. No person looks into the camera in a Frederick Wiseman documentary. Some critics use the term cinéma vérité to describe his type of filmmaking, but Wiseman rejects this label. He says it suggests a guy showing up and hanging around, filming whatever happens to be there. […]

By Forrest Cardamenis. In what may prove to be Interstellar’s most memorable scene, Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper (that’s a last name; curiously, he is never given a first) is transported into a teserract in which time is physically navigable. While there he tells TARS, a helpful robot who has been with […]

By James Teitelbaum.  Durban is the third-largest city in South Africa, and is the biggest port town on the continent’s Indian Ocean coast. Although about half of the city’s population are black African and over a third of the population considers Zulu to be their first language, Durban is also […]

By Matthew Sorrento. He can “work all day, and creep all night,” stated Dr. James Grigson, nicknamed Dr. Death (for his penchant for sending the accused to the chair) about Randall Adams, the man wrongfully accused for the murder of a Dallas policeman featured in Errol Morris’ exemplary documentary The Thin […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su.  Spanish writer/director Carlos Marques-Marcet’s 10.000 Km is the kind of movie that’s powered by so much honesty and insight that, despite the built-in developmental restrictions from its limited thematic focus, casts a universal spell and hits you on the most visceral level. Photographer Alex (Natalia Tena) wins an […]