By Dean Goldberg. On November 23th, 2018, a particularly cold and rainy Saturday afternoon, my friend, Jonathan David, a commercial director living in Los Angeles, texted me a headline about the death of director Nicolas Roeg: “I heard this on BBC Radio and immediately thought of you,” it chimed. Unfortunately, […]
Fair and Balanced, for Real – Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
December 7, 2018
By Michael Sandlin. Alexis Bloom’s Divide and Conquer could have easily been conceived as a shameless liberal hit job on an easy target: far-right fake news guru and prolific sexual harasser Roger Ailes, founder of Fox News and the head bully-boy behind the modern Trumpian Republican political class. Yet this documentary […]
Choosing Your Own Family: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters
December 7, 2018
By Matthew Fullerton. Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest drama, the Palme-d’Or-winning Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku), is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary family: Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) is a middle-aged man who, though physically able to work, prefers supporting his family through petty crime. He plies his trade with the boy Shota […]
The Man Who Would Be Scar – Henry Brandon: King of the Bogeymen by Bill Cassara and Richard S. Greene
A Book Review by Tony Williams. In one way, my title is misleading. Despite the impressive appearance of Henry Brandon’s Scar appearing as an appropriate “monster from the id” with blue eyes and European presence to John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956), this impressive labor of love, that could […]
Film Scratches: Self-Portrait of the Self-Portraitist – Astrid’s Self-Portrait (2015)
December 5, 2018
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. Astrid’s Self-Portrait is Rena Riffel’s experimental feature about a woman obsessively documenting her own life. The opening of the film, labeled […]
Film Scratches: Conditioned Responses – Recent Short Work by Steven Lapcevic (2014-2018)
December 5, 2018
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 the mesmerizing and terrifying worlds created by 3d animator Steven Lapcevic we’re all just puppets, hyper-conditioned by the media into […]
More than Rippin’ or Rascality: Jonah Hill’s Mid90s
By Brandon Konecny. “My visceral reaction when I hear someone is making a movie about skateboarding is…I wish they [sic] wouldn’t,” says professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen. And his remarks are understandable. Aside from maybe Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), skateboarding has never fared well in narrative cinema, usually serving as an […]
“Viewers Have Their Own Pace”: Christophe Charrier on Jonas
By Tom Ue. Much of contemporary crime fiction revolves around the search for resolution rather than solution. Some, such as Epix’s new television adaptation of Joël Dicker’s bestselling novel The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2018), offers both. Christophe Charrier’s Jonas (also known as Boys) (2018) offers neither. The […]
Rebirth: Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria
By Janine Gericke. In 1977, Italian horror legend Dario Argento released Suspiria – a seminal classic among horror fans and cinephiles. Luca Guadagnino, whose Call Me by Your Name won raves last year, has made a compelling albeit head-scratching homage to the original film. Taking place in 1977 Berlin, a young woman joins […]
There’s No Place Like Home: Revisiting Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (Criterion Collection)
December 3, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. In her essay for the Criterion Collection release of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Moira Weigel opens with a roll call of the assorted characters who have appeared in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: There is the cruel friend from Berlin Alexanderplatz, carrying himself like a […]