By Michael Sandlin. It’s now been eight years since Scandinavian prankster filmmaker Mads Brugger donned his pith helmet and jodhpurs in Angola to impersonate a blood diamond buyer – recording on film the whole farcical mess that ensues for his 2011 documentary feature The Ambassador. Now mad Mads is back in Africa in […]
City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, and the New Hollywood Cinema
Heather Hendershot
August 19, 2019
By Heather Hendershot. The following is excerpted from When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, edited by Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (Cornell University Press, 2019), by permission of the press. In 1965, John Lindsay beat out Abraham Beame and William F. Buckley Jr. to be elected mayor of New […]
An Old Soul Gone Too Soon: Love, Antosha
Yun-hua Chen
August 16, 2019
By Yun-hua Chen. Paying tribute to the late actor Anton Yelchin’s life, this biographical documentary extends far beyond his acting career. As Garret Price’s directorial debut premiered at the Sundance three years after the freak car accident in 2016 which took Yelchin’s life at the age of 27, the film […]
Mike Wallace is Here – and Isn’t
Christopher Sharrett
August 14, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. The premises of the new documentary Mike Wallace is Here are contradictory, and I suppose meant ironically so. The late TV journalist, most famous for helping start the television “magazine” 60 Minutes, is portrayed as the founding father of hardball electronic journalism – and a shameless huckster who sold […]
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché – Saluting the Film Archival Community
Elias Savada
August 14, 2019
By Elias Savada. In a way, I consider myself a film archivist. I don’t do that for a living now, but I do have close ties with many such institutions, especially in the United States (the larger repositories being the Library of Congress, NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, Rochester’s George […]
The Excelling Historical Document – Film and the Historian: The British Experience by Philip Gillett
Tony Williams
August 12, 2019
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Some months ago, I struggled through a book about remembering British Television published by the BFI. My dissatisfaction with the contents stemmed from my feeling that it represented a theoretical top-down approach showing very little evidence of necessary field work whose empirical (a bad […]
Enthralling Familiarity: Claudio Giovannesi’s Pirahnas
Ali Moosavi
August 9, 2019
By Ali Moosavi. Pirahnas, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, is based on a novel by Roberto Saviano, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Saviano also performed this double duty on Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008). Pirahnas begins with a scene inside a deserted […]
All the Writers Dreamed They’d be Your Partner: Elaine May Writing for Warren Beatty, Director
Dean Brandum.
August 6, 2019
By Dean Brandum. The following was originally written as a chapter for inclusion in ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019, edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum). Due to space issues, however, it does not feature in the final version of the book and is thus published […]
The Mountain: A Discouraging Word
August 6, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. My subtitle is taken from a moment in Rick Alverson’s film The Mountain, where we see a black-and-white, furniture-bound TV, the type representative of the 1950s, showing Perry Como singing “Home on the Range,” a song that is close to a national anthem, and is referred to as […]
A Deep Affect for Regional Genre Films: Aaron Harvey on Into the Ashes
Tom Ue
August 2, 2019
By Tom Ue. Aaron Harvey is the writer and director of several award-winning feature films including Catch.44 (2011), starring Bruce Willis, Forest Whitaker and Malin Akerman, and The Neighbor (2018), William Fichtner, Michael Rosenbaum and Jessica McNamee. Into the Ashes (2019), his latest, centres on Nick (Luke Grimes), a former […]