Review

By Martin Kudláč. In the 1996 film The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella is a scene with British soldiers examining a map. “But can we get through those mountains?” to which another replies “The Bell maps show a way” followed by “Let´s hope he was right.” This reference has […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su.  Films are lives imagined, projected, simulated. When the play-pretend is effective and the make-believe works, we can hope to lose ourselves in a staged reality that convincingly reflects our own. Every once in a long while, however, a movie would come along that, for reasons often too […]

By Kate Hearst. With an artful lens, All This Panic captures the awkward and fleeting stage of teenagers on the cusp of young adulthood. Over the course of three years, Brooklyn-based wife and husband art photographers, Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton, follow seven high school girls who attend the La […]

By Elias Savada. If you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the system works. As a study in government failure and corporate greed, this HBO-supported documentary from director Rebecca Cammisa shows that your trust is grievously and tragically misplaced if you expect the Environmental Protection […]

By Christopher Sharrett. I should say at the outset that my thoughts about the social-political vision (or failure thereof) of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World are dependent on the fine work of Henry Giroux, whose remarks are available on the Internet (I’d recommend his “Neoliberalism and the Disappearance of the Social […]

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Who would have figured the Canadian director of such diverse films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), North Dallas Forty (1979), and First Blood (1982) would be such an engaging raconteur? But here he is, at age 86, recounting great stories about the making of his films, the people […]

By Tony Williams. In his 2015 detailed and definitive study The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Paul Seydor lamented the fact that then available copies of the only film Marlon Brando directed were from inferior sources and hoped to see “a proper, responsible […]

By John Duncan Talbird. Terrance Davies’ most recent film, A Quiet Passion, is a strange drama. It is a biopic and a period piece, an adaptation without a source text, an homage, and a fiercely original work. Most of the action takes place inside the walls of Emily Dickinson’s home in […]

By Ali Moosavi. Lynn Ramsey’s violent film noir was the last film to be shown at the Cannes Official Competition. It is based on a short novella by Jonathan Ames. Joaquin Phoenix has considerably beefed up to play the role of Joe, a heavy, doing jobs for a private dick. He […]

By Jeremy Carr. The 1980s was a pivotal period for horror films. As low-budget “Video Nasty” provocations steadily faded from America’s grindhouse screens, the down and dirty days of the 1970s were getting displaced by family-friendly creature features and box office-busting franchises. Though there had been historical antecedents for decades, […]