Review

By Jacob Mertens. Many times, a film is most compelling inside that beautiful moment of transport evoked by the flickering lights cast across a white canvas. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is not one of these films. The auteur’s latest demands a great deal of attention from the audience and […]

By Matthew Sorrento. By reissuing David Fincher’s The Game (1997), the Criterion Collection commits an act of outright auteurism. This film sits on the lower Fincher shelf, somewhere near Alien3 and Panic Room. The filmmaker’s come a long way – he now seems unflappable after his reflections on life/mortality in […]

By Jacob Mertens. Imagine the breadth of daily life changed by a single important innovation: the ability to travel through time. In order to breathe life into this story, a writer must allow the detail of time travel to slowly distort the world around it as if dropping a pebble […]

By Anna Arnman. Laurence Anyways is the 23-year-old Canadian Xavier Dolans third film as director and writer. His acclaimed previous films J´ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother, 2009) and Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010) were partly autobiographical and Dolan also acted in them, but this time he follows […]

By Janine Gericke. There are some movies that I refuse to watch. There are some things that I don’t need burned into my brain. Usually, that Black List consists of painful and uncomfortable things like Eli Roth’s torture porn oeuvre. Surprisingly, Compliance is far from torture porn. It doesn’t have gore. But it […]

By Daniel Lindvall. The music documentary Searching for Sugar Man had its world premiere earlier this year at Sundance. A fitting place since this is, according to its Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, “an American story.” It is also a Detroit story, a story about the music industry, but most of […]

By Daniel Lindvall. Barbara (2012), written and directed by Christian Petzold, is a remarkable film. It may well be the best so far of all the German films made in recent years on the still very much contentious subject of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR). Generally speaking, such films, […]

By Jacob Mertens. All writers, at one point or another, have felt the inspired moment when a story moves through them as if they were a conduit. The ability to manifest a living, breathing creature on a piece of paper can feel like an act of magic, and it is […]

By Janine Gericke. 25 events, 2 brothers, 1 champion. Mark and Jay Duplass’ latest film, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon is an enigmatic comedy about two estranged brothers who want to determine once and for all, who the better brother is. How do they do this? By competing in 25 sporting challenges over […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Imagine Seth MacFarlane, late at night, banging the deskspace next to his laptop – the real him, not the smiling, media friendly celebrity we’ve come to know. He’s on deadline to return notes for the script of his feature film, to be his feature directorial debut. In […]