By Jeremy Carr. Newly released from Tegal Prison, Franz Biberkopf cautiously looks over a custodial stretch of land just inside the wall that separates the penitentiary from the city streets. He walks a bit, hesitantly but with a slight smile. The camera is close on Franz, tracking this emphatically prolonged […]
Never Look Away: Art Against Death
Christopher Sharrett
April 29, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away is a good – but not great – film of this past season that deserves recognition; I wanted to wait to remark on it until a Region 1 Blu-ray arrived, which apparently won’t happen until the fall, so I purchased […]
Trick and Treat: Penny Lane’s Hail Satan?
Elias Savada
April 29, 2019
By Elias Savada. Never has a Penny Lane film been this funny. An academic-now-turned-full-professional-documentary-filmmaker, she has provided a window into the weird and wonderful for the last half-dozen or so years with her handful of features and several compelling shorts. She loves to take unusual relics of our planet and […]
I Made the Documentary The Cult of JT LeRoy, and I Must Discuss Savannah Knoop’s New Film
Marjorie Sturm
April 26, 2019
By Marjorie Sturm. The fact that JT LeRoy swallows and sings Albert’s platitudes makes the film fairly unwatchable for those who are hip to or suffered from the story.” I am the director and producer of the The Cult of JT LeRoy, the documentary that explores the elaborate literary hoax perpetrated […]
Daredevils of the Red Circle and Other Cliffhangers: Lone Pine and Daredevils of the West (1943)
April 25, 2019
“Daredevils of the Red Circle and Other Cliffhangers” is a blog on serials by Geoffrey Mayer, the author of Encyclopedia of American Film Serials (McFarland, 2017). The Good Lord really made this place [Lone Pine] for movies. There’s everything there. There’s sand, there’s rivers, its made for motion pictures. – Budd Boetticher Lone Pine, or more […]
Super Heroes Matter – Avengers: Endgame
April 24, 2019
By Elias Savada. It has come to this, the emotional end of the Marvel Comic Universe as we know it. In our real world, mankind has been gifted with 22 movies featuring (mostly) beloved characters. The magnificently collected groups of superheroes (Black Panther and Captain Marvel being among the latest […]
Scared Stiff: Ghost of No Chance
April 23, 2019
By Rod Lott. New on Blu-ray from Arrow Video, 1987’s Scared Stiff arrives with a stunningly inaccurate title – one that suggests a light comic romp, thanks to two earlier Hollywood pictures bearing that name, the more notable being a 1953 pairing of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. But Andrew Stevens and […]
Surveying Shorts in 2019: A Interview with Sharon Badal (Tribeca Film Festival)
April 22, 2019
By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival had more than 5,100 submissions for its shorts programs. With help from an international programming team, curator Sharon Badal has compiled 11 shorts programs with various themes from the annual New York shorts program – this year’s entry, Streetwise is […]
Dickinson Unbowdlerized: Wild Nights with Emily
April 19, 2019
By Elizabeth Toohey. Biopics, especially literary ones, tend to gravitate towards the grandiose. Sweeping vistas and luxurious estates command center stage as a setting for glamorous historical figures cloaked in elegant costumes whose lives appear a tumultuous series of clandestine love affairs, artistic ambitions, and untimely deaths. These period pieces, in […]
Film Scratches: Broadcast from Oblivion – .TV (2017)
April 18, 2019
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. In .TV, a 22 minute experimental video by Austrian-born, New York based artist G. Anthony Svatek, he uses highly imaginative narrative […]