By Elias Savada. Packing a $153 million weekend wallop here in her home country, and a huge $455 million on her native planet, Captain Marvel, the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, rallies itself after a sluggish start, and ultimately proves itself an acceptable crowdpleaser. Brie Larson, the Oscar-winning actor […]
Tradition Against Trafficking: Birds of Passage
Ali Moosavi
March 11, 2019
By Ali Moosavi. Films about drug trafficking in Central and South America have been on our cinema and TV screens almost continuously, from Scarface to Sicario. In recent years, there seems to have been more films and TV series about drug barons in Columbia and Mexico than any other topic; […]
What We’re Left with at the End: Jupiter’s Moon
John Duncan Talbird
March 7, 2019
By John Duncan Talbird. In the opening seconds of Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2014), we see a bird’s-eye view of Budapest, but a Budapest absent any people. It’s reminiscent of the opening of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… (2002) where downtown London has been wiped clean of people from what […]
A Problem of Catharsis and Urban Space: Ondi Timoner’s Mapplethorpe
Mina Radovic
March 6, 2019
By Mina Radovic. Robert Mapplethorpe is one of New York’s famous black-and-white photographers of the 1970s: coming out after the Warhol generation and in touch with the underground, Mapplethorpe is remembered for his distinct use of monochrome composition, imbued with a sense of rigid formalism coupled with controversial and often […]
Deliberate Relief: Visconti’s Death in Venice (Criterion Collection)
February 26, 2019
By Gary M. Kramer. Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella, has been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection in a new 4K digital restoration. The film is a classic story of unrequited love as Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) becomes […]
A Cinephile’s Cinephile – Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 by Adrian Martin
Jeremy Carr
February 25, 2019
A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. At the very least, Adrian Martin’s Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) makes the reader want to watch more movies. Not a specific genre of movies, nor those of a particular nation or movement, nor […]
A Career Cut Short – Laird Cregar: A Hollywood Tragedy by Gregory William Mank
Tony Williams
February 19, 2019
A Book Review by Tony Williams. “It was not only his desire to play heroic roles that made him diet, but the hope that he would attract a young lover through his own beauty. He never did and he was too innately shy to be aggressive.” (DeWitt Bodeen) (1) For […]
The Compulsive Writer-Director’s Guide – Making Your First Feature Film by Dominick Bagnato
Mads Larsen
February 18, 2019
A Book Review by Mads Larsen. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to burn, and although you have no experience, you are obsessed with making your own film – no matter how bad it becomes – then Making Your First Feature Film by Dominick Bagnato (McFarland, 2017) could […]
Fighting in America: Tim Sutton’s Donnybrook
Thomas Puhr
February 15, 2019
By Thomas Puhr. It’s only fitting that writer-director Tim Sutton’s latest, Donnybrook (2018), opens with a voyage by boat. Like Odysseus, Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) undergoes a long journey that culminates in a bloody showdown. Waiting for him at the end of the river is the titular underground fight, which […]
Handicapping the Oscars: 2019 Oscar Nominated Shorts
February 14, 2019
By Elias Savada. Another year and another Academy Awards show looms large, filled with commentary about snubs and surprises and a program, the first in decades, without a host. While many of us wonder which film will take home the statuette (my personal favorite remains Green Book, but Roma seems to […]