By Elizabeth Toohey. Is the designer Vivienne Westwood anti-establishment or is she the establishment? Is she iconoclast or icon? More to the point, has her fashion been subversive, a form of resistance to English politics and culture, or has it been merely a commodification of the youthful punk rebellion of […]
A Surge in the Classroom: Serge Bozon on Mrs. Hyde
By Tom Ue. Serge Bozon’s latest film Mrs. Hyde follows the plight of a science teacher at a technical school (Isabelle Huppert). Despite 35 years of committed service, Mrs. Géquil is largely unsuccessful in communicating with either her students or her colleagues; and she is supported by a well-meaning, but […]
Perfectly Partial: Víctor Erice’s El Sur (Criterion Collection)
By Jeremy Carr. Writer-director Víctor Erice can be forgiven if he speaks of El Sur (newly released by the Criterion Collection) with more than a tinge of regret. This 1983 feature, only his second from 1973 to today (his sparse filmography largely consists of shorts and documentaries), wasn’t just released in […]
Glory of the Silents Reborn: the 23rd San Francisco Silent Film Festival
By Janine Gericke. I’ve been going to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) for ten years. My first introduction to the festival and the Castro Theatre was Buster Keaton’s 1923 film Our Hospitality. It was the first time I had ever seen a silent film with live musical accompaniment. […]
Observation and Immersion: 2018 AFI Docs
By Gary M. Kramer. The 2018 AFI Docs Film Festival screened over 90 features and shorts in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, MD. The films tackled topical issues such as the plight of refugees to more comical themes, such as the increasing popularity of “industrial musicals.” Many films took an […]
New Directions Emerging: Orson Welles in Focus, Edited by James R. Gilmore and Sidney Gottlieb
A Book Review by Tony Williams. During and since the time of Welles’s Centenary, many fine books and articles have appeared re-evaluating the work of a director once popularly regarded as a failure since making Citizen Kane, for one reason or another. Over the past few decades a dedicated group […]
Not Playing Smart: The Catcher Was a Spy
June 25, 2018
By Elias Savada. There’s an unsettling blandness flowing through The Catcher Was a Spy, a well photographed and impressively designed film about a fascinating character who made a mark in two wildly divergent professions. It’s a fictionalized account of Major League Baseball player Morris “Moe” Berg, as based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s […]
Life Commodified: Adilkhan Yerzhanov on Gentle Indifference of the World
June 21, 2018
By Ali Moosavi. When discussing world cinema, Kazakhstan is not a country which immediately springs to mind. Like many of the former Soviet Republic countries though, it is beginning to make a name for itself. These efforts received a major boost this year when the Kazak director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s film, The […]
Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice: Against All Doctrine
By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about Andrei Tarkovsky, about whom I’ve been hesitant for decades. A few remarks on the occasion of Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray of the director’s final film might be a good starting place for a consideration. […]
Film Scratches: Following the Logic of the Eye – noCOM (2014)
June 20, 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. noCOM stands for “no comment,” according to filmmaker Walter Ungerer, and that is appropriate because this ten minute short, a sequence […]