Review

By Elias Savada. “A naked virgin will illuminate your path with a blazing butterfly.” Yes, just the kind of fertile, fantastic utterance you would expect to hear in any luxuriant, eccentric Alejandro Jodorowsky film, especially in his ultra personal Endless Poetry (Poesía sin fin), and you’ll have to take the two-hour-plus […]

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. On the banks of the Padma lives Padma Halder, named after one of the bigger rivers flowing between the two countries of Bangladesh and India, divided by religion but sharing a common history. But Kaushik Ganguly’s new venture Bisorjon (or Bisarjan) chooses to look beyond that to explore the trope […]

By Elias Savada. Three years ago, filmmaker Gillian Robespierre arrived at the Sundance Film Festival with her first feature, Obvious Child, a small, smart comedy-drama about pregnancy and abortion. It was a charming and perceptive rookie endeavor that made many critics’ Top Ten lists. It also unleashed a new star in […]

By Jeremy Carr. Two credits stand out on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film Rumble Fish. One is Stewart Copeland, then drummer for The Police, who provided the picture’s hypnotic, dissonant rock-jazz score. The second is Michael Smuin, choreographer and co-director of the San Francisco Ballet; he staged an early fight scene […]

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Frederic Mermoud’s French-thriller Moka (2016) centers on a grieving woman who is on the hunt for the killers of her young son, fatally wounded in a hit-and-run accident. The film shows her pursuit of a couple in Evian, whom she suspects are the responsible perpetrators. […]

By Christopher Sharrett. There are certainly films more perceptive about class and race than Beatriz at Dinner, a film I put off seeing since its basic idea (a lower-class woman stuck in an upper-class dinner) seemed too familiar. The film is indeed based on an old concept most of us would recognize, […]

By Jessica Baxter. It’s been over 30 years since Albert Brooks unleashed his on-point satire about the mental unraveling of dissatisfied yuppies in Regan-era America. And while Easy Rider (1969) the film that inspires them, is even further in the rearview today than it was in 1985, the sentiments of ignorance, delusion, […]

By Christopher Sharrett. The terms “ascetic” and “austere” are too-common adjectives applied to the films of Robert Bresson. It is reasonable to apply them, but for me “constricted,” “severe,” and “repressed” serve better. Many of Bresson’s films, especially in his late phase, are utterly drained of eroticism; critics have debated […]

By Elias Savada. Bruce Willis still tracks 243 on the IMDB.com STARmeter scale (I’m at 1,325,678). All kind of entertainment folk are part of the ratings, and Willis has been moving downward lately after decades in the top 100. His gradual tumble down the rankings rabbit hole began with the […]

A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb’s Global Cinema Cities (Columbia UP, 2016) poses as its task to explore “the evolving, mutually constitutive relations between moving image media and the global city, [but to do] so at a time when profound questions are being asked about […]