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 […]
Celebrating a Life Well Spent: Itzhak
April 25, 2018
By Elias Savada. It’s fitting that this refreshing documentary starts out with the world renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman performing a rousing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Citi Field in Queens, New York. He may have been born in Tel Aviv 70-plus years ago, but he’s a die-hard Mets fan […]
Where is Kyra?: Women in Transition
By Christopher Sharrett. I have no reservations about using a central, foundational handbook serving women as the subtitle to this piece (in part because my wife was co-author of the original edition), since the topic of Charles Dosunmu’s excellent film is women made peripheral and in transit in the current […]
De Palma’s Scarface at 35: a TriBeCa Panel
April 24, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. Brian DePalma’s 1983 remake of Howard Hawks’ Scarface, with a script by Oliver Stone, had a special 35th anniversary screening at the TriBeCa film festival with DePalma, Pacino, and costars Michelle Pfeiffer and Steven Bauer in attendance. The film received raucous applause when it started and […]
Genius in Collaboration: The Outer Limits, Season One from Kino Lorber
By Tony Williams. I saw my first episode of The Outer Limits on a regional independent television station in the mid-60s. Opening with the evocative credit sequence “There is nothing wrong with your television set. We will control everything…” the off-screen voice of Vic Perrin promised to take us all […]
The Endless: Who’s Crazy Now?
April 21, 2018
By Elias Savada. I’ve been a fan of horror maestros Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead ever since catching their 2012 feature debut Resolution at that year’s SpookyFest in Washington DC. Last year that festival (following the lead of the Tribeca Film Festival, where the filmmakers are deservedly well appreciated) also sported […]
A Genre Reclaimed: Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge
April 18, 2018
By Alex Brannan. There is a critical stigma to the small subset of films that comprise the rape-revenge genre – or, at the very least, a healthy hesitation. In 1980, Roger Ebert famously took down Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave, calling it “a vile bag of garbage … without […]
A Little Bold, and a Little Lighter: Sharon Badal on 2018 Tribeca Shorts
By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival, unspooling April 18-29, features 10 competitive shorts programs curated by the masterful Sharon Badal. (An ESPN program of four sports shorts also screening at the fest is outsourced and out of festival competition.) The programs this year feature documentary, animated, […]