By Janine Gericke. On March 24, 25, 31 and April 1, 2012, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival proudly presented Abel Gance’s five and a half hour epic Napoléon at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre presented by film historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow, along with the British Film Institute, American Zoetrope, the Film Preserve, and Photoplay Productions. Brownlow’s love of this film began in the 1950s, when […]
Le Havre
By Celluloid Liberation Front. Outside the gentrified humanism for ‘members only’ and the gated communities of meritocracy, in the suburbs of a neglected humanity is Le Havre, the latest film by Aki Kaurismäki. When European stars could not fly yet they would sail to Hollywood from the port of Le […]
$ellebrity (2012): A SXSW Review
By Jacob Mertens. The concept of celebrity and fame has existed for ages. As a society, we seek to hold individuals up as an ideal, something tangible and attainable. We try to live vicariously through another’s natural talent and beauty, we construct an image of grace and vulnerability, and we […]
The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)
By Joseph Wright. Gritty and ruthless are not adjectives that I had ever associated with Matthew McConaughey following his work in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) and Failure to Launch (2006), however, they hardly do the actor justice regarding his performance as Mick Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer. The film […]
The Cabin in the Woods (2011): A SXSW Review
By Jacob Mertens. Stop me if you have heard this story before: a group of teenagers head to a remote cabin in the woods, trading pithy comedic dialogue as a menacing score drifts in and out. The men and women on screen are young, carefree, and about die increasingly gruesome […]
Chronicle (2012)
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. “With great power there must also come — great responsibility.” This maxim, first delivered via narration in Marvel Comics’ Amazing Fantasy #15 (the August, 1962 issue in which Spider-Man made his debut), is perhaps the most widely recognized quote in comic book history. For half a […]
The Grey (2012)
By Jacob Mertens. In the beginning of the poem “Dante’s Inferno,” Dante finds himself in a dark wood, disorientated, grasping for an understanding of his surroundings. Within this grim setting, the poet conjures a primordial chaos, in which Dante’s last impressions of life follow him into the death. In much […]
‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ or The Devil is a Woman
By Christopher Sharrett. I find Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin to be among the more vexing films I have recently seen. It is a notable contribution to the domestic melodrama, at a time when the genre is besieged by “dramedies” about families with problems that aren’t problems […]
What Separates Us from ‘A Separation’
By Celluloid Liberation Front. ‘Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.’ (Herbert Marcuse) The cinema of the Middle East is often stereotypically seen under the restrictive frame of ‘realism’. Euro-American audiences tend to associate formal experimentation with Western […]
The Iron Lady (2011)
By Salomon Rogberg. Margaret Thatcher’s reign over England may have ended over twenty-one years ago, but she’s still a sensitive topic that can generate both anger and admiration. When Phyllida Lloyd’s new film, The Iron Lady (2011), was released in Sweden and Britain, it led to heated discussion amongst critics in […]