Review

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 […]

By Janine Gericke. The Good Life is director Jean Denizot’s feature film debut, and it proves to be a solid one. The film, based on actual events, follows a father, Yves (Nicholas Bouchaud), and his two teenage sons, 16-year-old Sylvain (Zacharie Chasseriaud) and 18-year-old Pierre (Jules Pelissier), as they live […]

By Paul Risker. Cities rise, or fall, at the will of men. In a conflict of wills in 1944, Paris, the “City of Light,” was spared. Beyond the narrative presented in Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy (2014) there inevitably lies a more compelling and intricate story of the events leading up to […]

By Daniel Lindvall. At some point early on in Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic disaster film 2012 (2009) we know that 999.85 per mille of the world’s population is doomed to perish in the coming flood. We also learn that, secretly, the governments of the most powerful nations on Earth, the G8, […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su.  Swedish comedic drama Force Majeure is a sneaky, unsparing, surgically accurate stab to a very particular part of the human sensibility, which makes it at once hilarious and deeply unsettling to watch. Written, directed and performed with remarkable intelligence and empathy, it tickles, provokes, cooks up delicious tension throughout, […]