Review

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 […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su. The Ukranian dramatic thriller The Tribe marks the arrival of a major directorial talent in Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, who delivers a feature debut here that’s artistically challenging, topically provocative, stylistically assured, and an all-around daring, alluring, searing work of vision. Set in an educational institution for the deaf […]

By Christopher Neilan.  Pialat is not celebrated in the US like Truffaut, nor adored in critical circles like Godard and Melville.  He’s a palme d’or winner who emerged in the post-new wave environment – Truffaut, in fact, produced his first feature in 1968 – but one whose rigidly realist, langorously […]

By Jakub Wojnarowski. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) Every human writes her own story. But how could one make this narrative coherent, if every chapter is being erased as soon as it is ready? That is what happens to Christine Lucas in Before I Go to Sleep (written and directed by Rowan […]

By Eija Niskanen.  Sion Sono, Japanese cinema’s enfant terrible, has delved into the topic of the 2011 Northern Japan 3/11 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant accident in two of his recent films, Himizu (2011) and Land of Hope/Kibo no kuni. Himizu, based on a manga by Minoru […]

By Christopher Sharrett. Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves was one of the few films of the last season that deserved real recognition and got only a little; it was swamped, as per custom, by the usual blockbusters and played only in the cities and university towns. Reichardt is emerging as an […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su.  Marking the sixth collaboration of what’s shaping up to be the most compelling and fruitful auteur-actor duo in modern German cinema, writer/director Christian Petzold’s Phoenix starring Nina Hoss is a well-realized drama with a singular concept soaring in its intellectual reach and emotional resonance. Set in a […]

By Noah Charney. For performance artists, their bodies are the canvas on which to paint, the marble from which to sculpt. Some have pierced their bodies with pins, others with vicious hooks linked to chains from which they hang by their nearly-torn flesh, as in some grotesque fresco of martyrdom […]