By Jeremy Carr. As noted by no less an authority than Mr. MonsterVision himself, Joe Bob Briggs, to distinguish a good Herschell Gordon Lewis film from one that is of lesser quality is something of a futile effort. It’s hard to really say one title is better than another, just […]
A Treat Grows in Brooklyn: Hearts Beat Loud
By Elias Savada. One way or another, I always seem to get a plastic high when watching a film with an old fashioned record store. High Fidelity (2000), Empire Records (1995), Ghost World (2001), and even Last Shop Standing, Pip Piper 2012’s documentary about the rise and fall of about two […]
In Awe of Everything: The Gospel According to André
June 8, 2018
By Janine Gericke. I’ll start by saying that The Gospel According to André is a delightful film about a delightful human. The film is enthralling and made me laugh out loud at many points, which I wasn’t exactly expecting. One particular scene involving Isabella Rossellini’s two pigs, Boris and Pepe, […]
The Feminist Battle for Respect – The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist by Michelle Morgan
June 7, 2018
A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. Whenever one sets out to write a book about a real-life person, be it a traditional biography or any other kind of study or retrospective, the question of ethics inevitably comes to the forefront. How does one do justice to a life and work […]
Uncovering the Katyn Massacre Cover-up: An Interview with Piotr Szkopiak on The Last Witness
By Sergey Toymentsev. Piotr Szkopiak’s The Last Witness offers a fictional rendition of a cold-blooded execution of 22,000 Polish officers and civilians by the Stalin’s secret police in 1940, a horrific slaughter known as the Katyn massacre, of which both the US and British governments were well aware yet deliberately […]
On Compiling The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Film
June 5, 2018
Editor Salvador Jiménez Murguia recently published The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Film (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), a project that covers the breadth of material it promises and features work by several top scholars in film, including Film International Co-Editor Matthew Sorrento and contributor Tom Ue. Murguia discusses the project below. In the intro, […]
Nightmares from LA and von Trier: 2018 Cannes, Week Two
By Ali Moosavi. It is very unusual for Cannes, or indeed any film festival that I care to remember, to provide a warning in the festival program for a particular film. In Cannes this year this honour was bestowed upon Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built, shown out […]
Arthouse Redux: Claire’s Camera
June 4, 2018
By Elias Savada. I’m a latecomer to the work of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, but I recently caught Night and Day (2004) and Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), which reveal this Seoul-born and Korean-then-American-trained filmmaker’s unconventional, character-driven films as interesting and sometimes forceful human studies (as well as being festival […]
The Story Comes First: An Interview with François Ozon on Double Lover
June 1, 2018
By Alex Ramon. From the patriarchy-busting provocations of his debut feature Sitcom (1998) to the understated elegance of Frantz (2016), François Ozon has created a body of work that’s among the most diverse and confounding in contemporary French cinema. Pegged initially as an enfant terrible, Ozon announced himself as a distinctive […]
Mountain: Epic to the Extreme
May 31, 2018
By Elias Savada. The word “breathtaking” doesn’t do justice to Australian documentarian Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain. It’s so far beyond that. The manner of the imposing photography, which often suggests someone climbing upside down, is just one of the remarkable things about this emotionally driven exploration of the majesty of rock. What […]