By Elias Savada. Investigative documentaries have been a cranky, yet effusive growth industry (thank you, Michael Moore) over the last couple of decades, more so with the improvements in technology that allow anyone to become a self-designated filmmaker. While these films still comprise a subgenre in search of a wider […]
The Law of Capital: The Measure of a Man
September 11, 2016
By Sérgio Dias Branco. Thierry Taugourdeau, factory worker, was fired along with more than 750 of his colleagues. He is 51 years old and has been unemployed for almost two. In the first scene of The Measure of a Man (La Loi du marché, 2015; “The Law of the Market” in […]
Hell or High Water: The Wasteland After
By Christopher Sharrett. Anyone of any consciousness who has toured the Southwest knows that it consists of pockets of great wealth surrounded by desert. Structurally, this is not unlike the rest of America, except that in the North and elsewhere we are generally concerned with dying cities: corporate citadels surrounded […]
Hope in the Search of Lost Films by Phil Hall
A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Phil Hall did a great service to film fans seeking the forgotten and obscure with his regular column “The Bootleg Files” that ran for years on the FilmThreat.com (regrettably defunct). A film programmer, publicist in indie film, author of six previous books and prolific writer, Hall […]
The Voice of a Frenetic, Heated Cinema – E̒ric Rohmer: A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe
August 23, 2016
A Book Review by James Knight. E̒ric Rohmer’s irrefutable place in the cathedral of film auteurs has been long since reserved. With films such as My Night with Maud in 1969, and Claire’s Knee in 1970, being among others, examples of the Rohmerian cinema that found poetry and philosophy in the […]
The French Spirited Away to New York: Phantom Boy
August 19, 2016
By Jessica Baxter. Co-directors Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol follow up their Oscar nominated film, A Cat in Paris, with Phantom Boy, a film that is perplexingly set in New York City, though everything else about it is as French as can be including the humor and animation style. The script […]
A Film of its Time: Spies, Fritz Lang’s Enduring Espionage Thriller
August 18, 2016
By Jeremy Carr. Fritz Lang’s Spies gets underway with a burst of kinetic energy, its first 15 minutes or so a case study in the advancement, endurance, and perhaps surprising vibrancy of late silent cinema. Released in 1928, this crime-thriller has a rapid-fire opening that drops the viewer headlong into […]
Lo and Behold – Can You Hear Me Now?
August 18, 2016
By Elias Savada. Werner Herzog’s documentaries tend to explore interesting lands or unusual people: the Chauvet caves in France (2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams), the frozen beauty of Antarctica (2007’s Encounters at the End of the World), or bear lover Timothy Treadwell (2005’s Grizzly Man) Now he catches up to something we find around […]
Time in “the Shack”: A Fuller Life
By Tony Williams. “The hatemongers and reactionaries are the most loathsome thorns in the eye of a great Democracy. Every generation has its own and they must be fought and defeated” (William Friedkin reading from A Third Face [2002] by Samuel Fuller). A Fuller Life is a daughter’s cinematic tribute to […]
La Chienne: Renoir Begins
By Christopher Sharrett. While the film is credited with bringing German Expressionism to French cinema and thus another step toward film noir, the film is notable for its sense of stillness….” My title is a bit misleading, since Jean Renoir made a number of films in the silent era (none […]