Review

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, […]

By Sam Littman. Is Whiplash the most controversial film of the year? In January, the film was anointed the American indie to keep an eye on through its festival run and eventual October release after taking both the Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance. October has finally arrived and […]

By Jeremy Carr.  David Lynch, via the Criterion Collection’s newly released Blu-ray of Eraserhead (1977), includes a television calibration option as a supplemental feature. With this, Lynch emphasizes that what we are about to see is a visual experience. It is important, therefore, and rightly so, that we adequately prepare […]

By Christopher Sharrett. The films of Pawel Pawlikowski have only intermittently interested me. I found his Woman in the Fifth (2011) utterly empty. My Summer of Love (2004) had much to recommend it, that is, up to the point where lesbian sex is conflated with psychopathology (the film shares some […]

By Jude Warne. Benny Loves Killing is director Ben Woodiwiss’ debut feature British film, and has multiple festival awards to its name, including the award for best horror film at the Oregon Independent Film Festival. Despite this particular genre categorization of the film as a “horror film,” it is up […]

By Elroy Pinto. On the first anniversary of his death, the Films Division of India released a DVD set that features all of Mani Kaul’s documentaries. However, it is important to note that Kaul’s visually formidable Mati Manas (1985) never made it to the DVD. Kaul, born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, […]

By Christopher Sharrett. Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger strikes me as a necessary film at a time when the US political cinema is at a low ebb – excluding the many fine straight-to-DVD documentaries by Robert Greenberg and others, about the criminal wars on the Middle East by the Bush […]