Review

By Johannes Schönherr. Under the Sun, a documentary by Soviet-born and -raised director Vitaly Mansky, starts off like an slice of life type of cinéma vérité, filmed in the winter dawn hours in downtown Pyongyang. The city looks grey and run-down, and the streets between the aging apartment blocks are […]

By Jude Warne. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are a seasoned, air-tight, top-notch funk-soul band. Via Jones’ musical talents and Bosco Man/Gabriel Roth’s analog recording and band leading genius, the group has managed to bring back the 60s funk and soul sound to our modern era, infusing it with a vibrant […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Joan Hawkins’ recent multi-authored book, Downtown Film & TV Culture 1975-2001 (Intellect), is a heteroglossic text bringing together multiple genres – historical documents, interviews, conversations, focused analysis, and even traditional academic articles – to paint a chaotically vivid picture of the New York “downtown” […]

By Elias Savada. OK, kids, who among you doesn’t know who Norman Lear is? The few of you who raised your hands, shame on you. (I tested this question on a friend half my age, and he thought I was talking about the guy who dropped a lot of LSD. […]

By Chris Neilan.  Here’s something to brighten the day of any self-respecting cinephile: the unearthing of a forgotten film by a bona fide American master. And not just any master, but Robert Altman. Few American directors are better loved than Altman, the own-tune-following iconoclast who defied structuring paradigms, paid attention to his […]

By Jessica Baxter. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I first stumbled upon René Laloux’s surreal animated French language sci-fi film, Fantastic Planet (1973). I assume I was old enough to read subtitles, but I’m not 100% sure because the visuals are engaging and unusual enough to […]

By Elias Savada. Problems are afoot in Woodyland. The jokes are there, albeit fleetingly and the best ones deal with gallows humor. The romantic comedy-drama script seems regurgitated from some of director-writer Woody Allen’s earlier works, and his alter-ego, Jesse Eisenberg, is back (after 2012’s To Rome With Love) for […]

By Chris Neilan.  Directors who blend genre elements with an arthouse sensibility are rarely short of fans or plaudits. Take new darling of the American independent scene Jeremy Saulnier, whose career-making sophomore feature Blue Ruin (2013) applied a realist monkey-wrench to the nuts and bolts of the revenge thriller. Or […]

By Elias Savada. With big nods toward Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes), and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), twenty-something writer-director Mickey Keating has chomped down on a big slab of 1970s grindhouse meat and spat out Carnage Park, […]

By Cleaver Patterson.  One has to question why some filmmakers see fit to remake films which were considered classics the first time round – is there so little original material and imagination out there that they have to revert to old material for inspiration? Take for instance 1945’s exquisite British […]