Review

By Elias Savada. Making sense out of urban chaos was more than a dream for Jane Jacobs. It was a battle cry. Jacobs, a writer-journalist turned activist who passed away in 2006, took aim at New York City planning czar Robert Moses, who ruled the Big Apple skyline and parkway system […]

By Elias Savada. The film is brief (76 minutes), but the title isn’t – My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea. Not as long (word wise) as 1991’s mouthful Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Although countless books have appeared in past and present featuring stars, many who never achieved enduring fame are often unjustly neglected despite the fact that they survived and delivered professional performances throughout their careers. One example is Ricardo Cortez (1900-1977). Born in New York […]

By John Duncan Talbird. It’s hard to know why Werner Herzog still makes fiction films. He clearly loves to travel to strange and wonderful places as part of his work, to film these landscapes and interpret them. He has the loose, improv nature of the documentarian and his recent documentaries are […]

By Elias Savada. Both old school and old-fashioned come together in style and substance in Tommy’s Honour, Jason Connery’s passable historical look at golf. The drab (in a good, yet unexciting way) production design is definitely Scottish mid-19th century, and the acting could be called grand without being exceptional. Think a […]

By Devapriya Sanyal. At first glance it may seem that Glory, the new Bulgarian film directed by Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva, belongs to Tzanko Petrov (Stefan Denolyubov), the honest but simple linesman who returns the cash he finds on a railway track he services. In the beginning nothing much happens […]

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. In The Lives of Robert Ryan (Wesleyen University Press, 2015), Chicago film critic J.R. Jones points out the many contradictions in the actors’ career and life as reflected in the title of the book. The actor did, in fact, lead many lives. Ryan was […]

By Elias Savada. The actual typhoon in After the Storm is more than a physical catastrophe. It’s a powerful metaphor for an acclimatized world of broken families. It takes more than half this modest, sensitive Japanese feature’s nearly two-hour running time for the gusts and driving rain to arrive, wherein […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Last week, a friend and fellow reviewer Chris Sharrett told me about his experiences at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference that drew immediate parallels, not with the more accomplished zombie films of George A. Romero, but countless others reworking familiar lyrics […]