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 […]
Dating and Vulnerability: Sherren Lee and Jesse LaVercombe on The Things You Think I’m Thinking
April 26, 2018
By Tom Ue. Director Sherren Lee’s latest offering, the short film “The Things You Think I’m Thinking” follows a date between a burn survivor and amputee (Prince Amponsah) and a regularly-abled man (Jesse LaVercombe). It has earned the AWFJ EDA Award at the 2017 Whistler Film Festival, the Special Jury Award […]
Rediscovering the Cinema Culture of the Congo: An Interview with Cecilia A. Zoppelletto
April 26, 2018
Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. – Karl Marx, Estranged Labour For Marx, we humans as a ‘species being’ are defined by our engagement with our environment, which is shaped to meet our needs. Human ingenuity […]
A Televisual Tale of Three Cities – Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore by Charlotte Brunsdon
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This concisely written and informative monograph represents a critical examination of the role cityscapes play within certain televised fictional representations. While many books exist on the city landscape, the marginalization of television as a valid discursive territory in its own right has led to […]