Review

By Andrew J. Douglas.  Anticipating an early effort by a respected filmmaker—let alone one known for work that is at once thoughtful, entertaining, acclaimed, and popular like Christopher Nolan—can be conflicting. There is the tantalizing allure of raw, unbridled talent on display, accompanied by the reticence ignited by the possibility […]

By Matthew Sorrento. The choice of writer-director JC Chandor to cast Robert Redford in All is Lost was astute, if not fortunate. By offering Redford the sole role in this survivalist-at-sea pic – essentially, a leaner Cast Away (2000; with no landing) for the 77-year-old performer, and a chance to […]

By Axel Andersson. At first it looks like an ornate latticework, but there is no way to separate the scars from the man. Most of us are familiar with the image, although few know the name of the most iconic whipped black man whose tortured skin has been reproduced so […]

By Danny King.  For his first two stabs at directing, Ralph Fiennes has selected subject matter that seems typical of an actor-turned-director almost to the point of parody. His 2011 debut, Coriolanus, took an oft-disregarded but palpably intense Shakespeare text as its starting point, and the resulting film is jam-packed […]

A book review by Liza Palmer. In 2004, I had the pleasure of reviewing the first edition of Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie for Scope. When I was approached to review the revised edition, I did not hesitate, recalling the first version to be a strong, […]

By Cleaver Patterson. A book like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was always going to be too big in size and scope to be contained, should it ever be made, by just one film. Whether this justifies stretching it over three, as New Zealand director Peter Jackson has done, […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. Every single bit of visual stimulus that comes to the human brain via the visual cortex must be interpreted, learned, and filed away for future reference. This morgue of literally countless images—and more important, bits of images—from every conceivable axial point of reference serves as a […]

A Book Review by Jack Curtis Dubowsky. Henry Mancini—the iconic composer of ‘Moon River,’ ‘Peter Gunn,’ ‘Baby Elephant Walk,’ ‘The Pink Panther,’ over 100 feature films, and winner of twenty Grammys and four academy awards—leaves a problematic musical legacy. As John Caps, author of this new book, puts it, “His […]

By Adam O’Brien. Like Roberto Rossellini, Ernst Lubitsch is a filmmaker whose greatness is both clear and very difficult to articulate. Penetrating and illuminating writing on his work (like that on Rossellini’s) is something of a rarity, and the availability of his films on DVD has been somewhat patchy. But […]

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny.  The increasing visibility of Eastern European films—those of the Romanian New Wave, especially—in the United States has brought with it a corresponding rise in volumes published on the subject, including, most notably, East European Cinemas (2005), The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema […]