Review

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 […]

By Morvary Samaré. The Invisible Men, an Israeli film by director Yariv Mozer, was one of the documentaries that screened at this year’s One World Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The film portrays the stories of three gay Palestinians and their struggle to create a tolerable life […]

By Jacob Mertens. In the summer of 2008, the Great Sichuan Earthquake rattled China’s cage and left a death toll of nearly seventy thousand people. Within this massive scope of destruction, the city of Beichan, once home to twenty thousand, was obliterated in a fleeting moment. The earthquake wiped Beichan […]