Review

By James Knight. Joint recipient of the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D. Godard’s latest effort has been compared to a collage or a mosaic, and described as a freewheeling explosion of colours, sounds and cinematic politics. But simply, Goodbye to […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. The upshot of what some teens would call a relationship in a world of cyberslaves sees rachel_angel83 (Jaime Winstone) and Mark87 (Jamie Blackely) carry an online relationship to devastating ends. But don’t try to figure out what will happen and who might be to blame because […]

By Cleaver Patterson.  Film documentaries are the cinematic equivalent of a written biography. As a result, it follows that those which include input from actual people involved with the subject, will take on something of an autobiographical tone. Such is the case with Birth of the Living Dead, which charts […]

By Gary M. Kramer. One of the highlights of Awesomefest’s summer line up is the free July 3 screening of the irresistible documentary, Living Stars, at 9:00 pm at Clark Park
, 4398 Chester Ave, in Philadelphia. This infectious, plotless film is an hour-long assemblage (by directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat) […]

By Jeremy Carr. This year marks the 70th anniversary of one of the greatest film noir ever made, perhaps the quintessential title of that perpetually popular and occasionally fluid cinematic category. To celebrate the occasion, a new restoration of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity premiered at the recent TCM Classic Film […]

By David Sterritt. Hans Detlef Sierck left Germany in 1937, arrived in the United States four years later, Americanized his name to Douglas Sirk, and directed his first Hollywood picture, Hitler’s Madman, in 1943, when the madman Adolf Hitler was still at large and ravaging the world. During the next […]

By William Repass.  Wind and mist over hills that turn out to be ruins. A funereal sutra chanted over the soundtrack. Beside a cluster of graves, the rough-hewn marker reads: “Here Stood Spider Web Castle.” These opening shots yield enough story material to piece together not only the outcome of everything […]

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Indie directors love to mix genres in order to introduce us to fairly realistic characters, unusual stories and fresh narrative strategies. Enid Zentelis effectively mixes elements of serious drama, romantic comedy, and discomforting black comedic elements of the horror film in her low-budget gem, Bottled Up […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the entries in NPR’s 2013 series “Movies I’ve Seen a Million Times,” Jesse Eisenberg’s is the most bizarre. When asked about a movie he could watch over and over again, this actor casually noted that he “never watches movies. I haven’t seen a movie in, […]

By Giuseppe Sedia.  To certain a degree Bullet Ballet (1998) represents a dividing line in Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cinematic career that shifted once and for all from film to digital after he entered into his forties. This was certainly a distressing but inevitable transition for the cineaste whose cult arose thanks […]