By Thomas Puhr. On paper, Lynne Ramsay’s breathtaking You Were Never Really Here (2017) sounds like one of Luc Besson’s off-the-cuff side projects, ala Taken (2008) or Colombiana (2011). After a mysterious war veteran, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, who is only getting better with age), rescues a senator’s abducted daughter from […]
An Insufficient Measure of Novelty: Jim Loach’s Measure of a Man (2018)
May 12, 2018
By Brandon Konecny. There’s a scene in Measure of a Man where Bobby (Blake Cooper) bickers with his sister Michelle (Liana Liberato) after she knocked the scoop off his chocolate-dipped ice cream cone. A shirtless Pete Marino (Luke Benward) interrupts their squabbling and introduces himself to Michelle. This leads to a […]
Market Values – Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television by Simon Brown
The Shining (1980) A Book Review by Tony Williams. During my final year in what was soon becoming Thatcher’s “green and septic isle” even before Blair and Tessie, I read quite a number of early Stephen King novels such as Carrie (1974), Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Cujo (1981), The Dead […]
Consistent Passion, Little Fanfare: RBG
May 4, 2018
By Elizabeth Toohey. Towards the end of the powerful new documentary RBG, we follow the 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a sculpture garden where she is being given a tour. Of a figure of a woman clad in armor standing at the ready, the guide explains, “It’s called […]
Portrait of Julia: Gustave Vinagre on I Remember the Crows
May 3, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. Julia Katherine is a trans actress with insomnia. In I Remember the Crows, her director, Gustavo Vinagre, films her as she monologues about her childhood – suffering abuse at a young age when her great uncle initiated a relationship with her – as well as talking […]
37th Istanbul Film Festival: Colours of the World on the Silver Screen
By N. Buket Cengiz. The Istanbul Film Festival, organised by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) for the 37th time on 6-17 April 2018, was introduced back in February with a poster in miniature style with characters from cult films such as A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), Arabesque (Arabesk, […]
A Modern Classic Revised: The French Cinema Book, 2nd Edition, Edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt
May 1, 2018
A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. In 2004, Michael Temple and Michael Witt published the first edition of The French Cinema Book (Palgrave/BFI, 2018) – an extremely welcome volume that succeeded in forcefully reframing the project of introducing the history of French cinema in a single volume. Now, 14 years later, Temple […]
Becoming Cary Grant: The Awful Truth from Criterion
By Tony Williams. It appears very unusual to think that the debonair star we tend to think of as an actual person was an invention, someone whom the actor himself would have liked to be in real life. Though seeing some of his films theatrically on first release such as […]
Ghost Stories: Earnest and Campy
By Alex Brannan. To break it down into the simplest of taxonomies, there are two types of horror anthology film: those which present discrete short films preoccupied around a central theme, and those which situate their shorts within a frame narrative. Both types have had a long cinematic history – […]
Observing Adolescence: Daniel Patrick Carbone on Phantom Cowboys
April 26, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. Daniel Patrick Carbone made a splash at the Tribeca Film Festival back in 2013 with his feature debut, Hide Your Smiling Faces, a largely improvised drama about two brothers growing up in rural New Jersey. The film depicted the characters’ coming-of-age, but the palpable mood and […]