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 […]
Laid to Rest: Frederic Mermoud’s Moka
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. […]
Beatriz at Dinner: Necessary Cinema
July 25, 2017
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, […]
Nothing’s Changed: Lost in America (Criterion Collection)
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, […]
L’argent: Bresson Ends
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 […]
A Stumble in the Woods: First Kill
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 […]
Diversity and Unity – Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media, Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb
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 […]
Out of the Dark(room) and Into the Light – The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
July 19, 2017
By Elias Savada. There is an elegant, simple beauty in documentarian Errol Morris’s affectionate portrait of his friend, soft-spoken, 80-year-old Elsa Dorfman, in his new film. In a career that spanned the majority of her adult life, Dorfman has found the fun in photography, and it’s probably best to spell it […]
Eleven Heroines Does a Feminist Film Make: Reading Srijit Mukherjee’s Rajkahini
By Devapriva Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini (2015) is the Bengali version of 2017’s much feted Begum Jaan, the film which served as the director’s first foray into Bollywood. The film is centred on India’s Partition and is uniquely seen through the eyes of women: a group of prostitutes in […]
A Most Assured First Feature: One Penny
July 15, 2017
By Elias Savada. Part I: The Buildup So, how many teenagers have you met who say they want to make movies when they grow up? Fame and fortune is just around the corner, right? Well, I’ve seen too many homegrown filmmaker dreams turn into muddled nightmares on the road to stardom, […]