A Book Review Essay by Ali Moosavi. There is an old adage that oppression and suppression fuels creativity. In the world of cinema, this is best exemplified in Palestinian Cinema. For a nation of less than five million people, it is undoubtedly the shining star in the Arab Cinema. In […]
An Invigorating Romp: Murray Pomerance’s A Dream of Hitchcock
August 24, 2019
A Book Review by John W. Fawell. The title of Murray Pomerance’s latest book on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY Press, 2018), refers to both the book’s content and its form. Pomerance means this book to be a study of the recurring motif of dreams […]
Coming of Age, in Detail: Third Wife
Janine Gericke
August 22, 2019
By Janine Gericke. There is a significant amount of symbolism throughout Ash Mayfair’s feature debut The Third Wife. The director and cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj juxtapose the nuances of the lush natural settings of Vietnam with the rigid 19th-century patriarchal society surrounding the film’s female characters. The film follows 14-year-old May […]
The Truth Lies….: Cold Case Hammarskjöld
August 19, 2019
By Michael Sandlin. It’s now been eight years since Scandinavian prankster filmmaker Mads Brugger donned his pith helmet and jodhpurs in Angola to impersonate a blood diamond buyer – recording on film the whole farcical mess that ensues for his 2011 documentary feature The Ambassador. Now mad Mads is back in Africa in […]
An Old Soul Gone Too Soon: Love, Antosha
Yun-hua Chen
August 16, 2019
By Yun-hua Chen. Paying tribute to the late actor Anton Yelchin’s life, this biographical documentary extends far beyond his acting career. As Garret Price’s directorial debut premiered at the Sundance three years after the freak car accident in 2016 which took Yelchin’s life at the age of 27, the film […]
Mike Wallace is Here – and Isn’t
Christopher Sharrett
August 14, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. The premises of the new documentary Mike Wallace is Here are contradictory, and I suppose meant ironically so. The late TV journalist, most famous for helping start the television “magazine” 60 Minutes, is portrayed as the founding father of hardball electronic journalism – and a shameless huckster who sold […]
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché – Saluting the Film Archival Community
Elias Savada
August 14, 2019
By Elias Savada. In a way, I consider myself a film archivist. I don’t do that for a living now, but I do have close ties with many such institutions, especially in the United States (the larger repositories being the Library of Congress, NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, Rochester’s George […]
The Excelling Historical Document – Film and the Historian: The British Experience by Philip Gillett
Tony Williams
August 12, 2019
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Some months ago, I struggled through a book about remembering British Television published by the BFI. My dissatisfaction with the contents stemmed from my feeling that it represented a theoretical top-down approach showing very little evidence of necessary field work whose empirical (a bad […]
Enthralling Familiarity: Claudio Giovannesi’s Pirahnas
Ali Moosavi
August 9, 2019
By Ali Moosavi. Pirahnas, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, is based on a novel by Roberto Saviano, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Saviano also performed this double duty on Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008). Pirahnas begins with a scene inside a deserted […]
The Mountain: A Discouraging Word
August 6, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. My subtitle is taken from a moment in Rick Alverson’s film The Mountain, where we see a black-and-white, furniture-bound TV, the type representative of the 1950s, showing Perry Como singing “Home on the Range,” a song that is close to a national anthem, and is referred to as […]