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 […]
Par for the Course: Tommy’s Honour
April 13, 2017
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 […]
Hobart Bosworth – Silent Cinema’s Sea Wolf: Behind the Door (1919) from Flicker Alley
By Tony Williams. Ever since seeing that unforgettable still in Kevin Brownlow’s The War, the West, and the Wilderness (1979), the grim-visage of Hobart Bosworth (1867-1943) in Behind the Door (Irvin V. Willat, 1919), wielding a scalpel with the shadow of his victim in the background, has occupied an ineradicable part of […]
Dividing Lives: Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva’s Glory
April 11, 2017
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 […]
Tough Onscreen and Off: The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones
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 […]
If Only We Could Live for Today: After the Storm
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 […]
“The Road Leads to Nowhere” – Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard Beyond Cinema by Michael Cramer
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 […]
De Palma’s Raising Cain: Re-cut and Revisited
April 4, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Since the release of Noah Baumbach’s 2015 documentary on Brian De Palma, the legendary filmmaker, who has for decades enjoyed a proud and vocal group of supporters, has become a grand cause célèbre for hip cinephiles eager to look back at even his most widely maligned films […]
Performing Gender and Self: Anup Singh’s Qissa
April 3, 2017
By Devapriya Sanyal. Qissa (“fable”), Anup Singh’s second directorial venture (2013; released in India in 2015), deals with many issues at the same time, with all its characters equally important. But this film belongs to the Sikh Punjabi character Umber Singh (played by Irrfan Khan). Beginning in the present, the film visits the past […]
Frantz and the Gentle Art of Forgiveness
March 31, 2017
By Elias Savada. Let’s refresh: the films of French writer-director François Ozon tend to be sly, unsettling, and daring observations of the human condition, whether playing with a 1950s musical mystery (8 femmes [8 Women], 2002), diving into a provocative thriller (Swimming Pool, 2003), offering some froth in the 2010 wife-empowered […]