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 […]
The Social Misfits of Kikujiro
September 19, 2016
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 […]
What Shall Remain Unseen?: Hidden Hitchcock by D. A. Miller
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 […]
Let the Muckraking Begin: When Two Worlds Collide
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 […]