Review

By Mark James.  Most of us probably remember John Berger as the host of Ways of Seeing, a four-part 1972 television series that he created for BBC where Berger educated the nation about looking at art, effectively demonstrating that one can discuss the so called ‘Old Masters’ in ways that […]

By Elias Savada. I had nearly forgotten about that nuclear blip a third of a century ago, the one which is the core of Robert Kenner’s new feature Command and Control. It was a missile crisis that nearly wiped out Arkansas and a nice chunk of the United States. So, are […]

By Gary M. Kramer. The title character of A Man Called Ove would probably not see the heartwarming Swedish film, A Man Called Ove, adapted from Fredrik Backman’s national bestseller (2012, English translation in 2013). He is far too cynical, and would call this gentle comedy-drama “mush nonsense.” Still, this […]

By Kate Hearst. Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven showcases a multiracial cast of personalities who collaborate to defeat a murderous robber baron on the American frontier. The overall cinematic spectacle of teamwork among this star-studded collection of lone gunslingers, led by Denzel Washington, is as deeply satisfying as the 1960 […]

By Christopher Weedman. The Last Film Festival’s comedic glimpse into the behind-the-scenes politics and turmoil that surround film festivals began as a joke between the film’s writer-producer-director Linda Yellen and its late iconic star Dennis Hopper during an encounter at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. When she asked him what […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Written by two former dealers in this area, A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies (University of Mississippi Press, 2016) offers readers a cinematic magical mystery tour into the now diminishing world of film collectors, a […]

By Jeremy Carr.  During post-production on The New World (2005), director Terrence Malick said it would be the last time he made a movie with a plot. Given the film’s free-form audio-visual flow and its loose narrative construct, the statement was met with some amusement. Plot though there may be, […]

By Christopher Weedman. The haunting enigmatism and visual beauty of Woman in the Dunes (1964) has not diminished since its premiere over fifty years ago. Shot on a budget of $100,000 over four months in Tottori City, Tottori-ken, this Japanese art-house classic was released during the wave of modernist filmmaking […]

By Yun-hua Chen.  Made by Takeshi Kitano in 1999 and having entered the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, Kikujiro was subsequently remade into a Tamil-Indian film Nandala (2010) by Myshkin. After more than one and a half decades, it still seems timeless both in terms of aesthetics and […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. A DVD player now lets everyone scrutinize Hitchcock’s esoteric images, but the desire to engage the game of hide-and-seek latent in them – a game just barely visible during theatrical projection – is born with the films themselves. (Miller, 167, n.14) I suspect that […]