Review

By Robert Kenneth Dator. ‘#1 Film Documentation!’ Anyone in the business has been here before. “Here” is The Twilight Zone of the runaway production. This is the one where any number of joint producers call the shots without talking to each other and never such incidental types as director and […]

By Jacob Mertens. Could you survive a Christmas holiday season without any products made in China? As far as opening conceits go, Xmas Without China offers its audience a compelling quandary. Following this premise, one might imagine a film that lives up to the honored tradition of documentary satire, in […]

By Jacob Mertens. A half-naked child streaks across the lawn chased by several twenty-something supervisors. They catch hold of him before he crosses property lines, holding his arms and legs down, letting him calm until he can return to his room under his own power. Shortly thereafter he does, and […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Among the last quips of genius from the lips of Oscar Wilde, truer words than these were never spoken. With his absolute dying breath he is supposed to have said: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the […]

By Jacob Mertens. Five friends camp out in a cabin, helping one of their own detox from drugs, only to find foul murder indelicately staged in the basement. Skinned cats hang from the ceiling, blood trails across the floor, and a pile of cinder speaks to some terrible crime committed. […]

By Daniel Lindvall. Wadjda (2012) is said to be the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. It is also written and directed by the nation’s first female film-maker, Haifaa Al Mansour. It is currently making its way through Europe, opening (or having already opened) early this year in […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Part Kim Jong-un’s “the West must fall” fantasy come to life, part right wing wet dream and all around militarist anthem, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen (2013) is an updated riff on John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962; though we’ve already had that in 2004, directed by […]

By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. For his first film since 2007’s Redacted, Brian De Palma returns to his Hitchcockian obsession, this time by way of Alain Corneau. A loose remake of Corneau’s final film, Love Crime (Crime d’amour, 2010), Passion feels very much like a De Palma flick from the ‘80s, with […]

By Cleaver Patterson. In film fantasy farmhouses have always been a popular mode of transportation between our world and that of make-believe. Dorothy used her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s humble home in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to reach a land beyond her wildest dreams, and now the ramshackle […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Scientists and mathematicians will never understand artists, and vice versa. This was brought home to me forcefully by David A. Kirby’s book, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), which traces the checkered history of math and science experts in […]