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, […]
An Archive of Indoctrination: Hitler’s Hollywood
April 16, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. Even if there wasn’t a compelling, underlying thesis to Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda: 1933–1945, this 2017 film by Rüdiger Suchsland would still be a valuable, fascinating record. For the sheer breadth of assembled material, an overwhelming array of Third Reich-era film clips from […]
Beauty and the Dogs: Women’s Revolution in Tunisian Cinema
By Matthew Fullerton. As Hollywood grapples with diversity issues, it is interesting to note how Tunisia, an emergent democracy since its 2011 revolution, has witnessed women filmmakers moving into the forefront of a traditionally male-dominated film industry. Emboldened perhaps by the 2014 Constitution guaranteeing freedom of opinion, thought, and expression, […]
Losing Touch: Ready Player One
April 11, 2018
By Dean Goldberg. While I’ll admit that Pong was the last video game I had any interest in and more recently got sea sick when a colleague slipped goggles on my head for a virtual world tour, I was still pretty excited when asked to review Steven Spielberg’s new film, Ready […]
Unfertile Perspectives – A Green and Pagan Land: Myth, Magic and Landscape in British Film and Television by David Huckvale
A Book Review by Tony Williams. According to an old saying about not judging a book by its cover, the same can apply both to the image on the cover as well as the subtitle. This latest study by David Huckvale, A Green and Pagan Land: Myth, Magic and Landscape […]
Metafictional Examination: The Workshop
By Travis Merchant. Recently, the rise of extreme right-wing groups and individuals have done more than upset the quotidian structure to society. More often than not, these individuals seem bent on violence and nationalistic tendencies. It began with the criticism of the European Union and the sudden, unpredicted secession of the United Kingdom […]
War’s Veiled Aftermath: 1945
By Jeremy Carr. On the day of her son’s wedding, presumably the central event of 1945, drug-addled Anna (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) ominously observes, “I’ve got a bad feeling.” At the time, this comment refers to the approaching marriage of her timorous son, Arpad (Bence Tasnádi), to the notoriously unfaithful Kisrózsi (Dóra […]
Placing Theory and Practice – Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality and Media edited by Roxanne Samer and William Whittington
April 4, 2018
A Book Review by Dean Goldberg. While the introduction to this collection of published essays from the storied Spectator, the University of California’s premier film journal, provides an articulate jumping off point for the text, the book itself is certainly not a page turner. Not that it should be; Spectatorship: […]