Review

By Ali Moosavi. Two films competing for the main prizes at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Both having a person’s name as their title. Lara (Jan Ole Gerster) from Germany and Patrick (Tim Mielants) from Belgium. Lara opens with a shot of the eponymous character, alone in her bedroom, […]

By Michael Sandlin. Greg Kinnear has come a long way since his early 1990s career phase sniggering at daytime talk show freaks for E! Network’s Talk Soup. Rising through the ranks of the late-night TV circuit, he finally gained some artistic cred with a series of marquee film roles playing […]

By Ali Moosavi. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, a number of national filmmakers, who were well-established in their homeland, such as Dariush Mehrjui (The Cow; The Cycle), Amir Naderi (The Runner; Water, Wind, Dust), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh; A Moment of Innocence), moved abroad. In the late director Sohrab Shahid […]

By Gary M. Kramer. Heredity filmmaker Ari Aster’s eagerly awaited sophomore feature, Midsommar, is impressive when one looks at the craft that went into it. There are elaborate dinner table scenes for dozens of guests, as well as intricate tapestries, costumes, and wall decorations. Aster’s camerawork is showy – some […]

By Jeremy Carr. “Love has reasons that even reason can’t understand.” This is what the father of soccer star Diamantino Matamouros once told his son, as recalled by the sporting prodigy in a benign, resigned voiceover. A resonant sentiment for anyone who has experienced the uncertainties of an unforeseen and […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Moseby Confidential: Night Moves and the Rise of Neo-Noir (Jorvik Press, 2019) is an interesting monograph of a hybrid nature. Written by Matthew Asprey Gear, author of the distinctive study At The End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City (Wallflower Press, […]

By John Duncan Talbird. In 1988, Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize. Five years later, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first black woman of any nationality to win it. It seemed to be the final bullet fired in the US Culture Wars that sprang […]

By Yun-hua Chen. Very few films can capture the feelings of a dream in an audio-visually mesmerizing way. What Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch achieved in their cinematic portraits of dreams and dreaminess is unparalleled, and now we can also comfortably add the young Chinese director Gan Bi […]