By Devapriya Sanyal. Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha looks at the lives of four women who live in Hawai manzil: Bua ji, who has forgotten her own name as no one calls her by that name anymore; Leela, who works in a neighbourhood beauty parlour and soon to be married; and […]
Bare Emotion: An Interview with Scud on Voyage
February 20, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. The mono-monikered Hong Kong writer-director-producer, Scud (born Danny Chan Wan-Cheung) has been making distinctive films for the past decade. His debut, City Without Baseball (2008), co-directed with Lawrence Lau, was based on stories of the Hong Kong baseball team, who also starred in the film. The […]
Unsung Hollywood Journeyman – Jean Negulesco, the Life and Films by Michelangelo Capua
A Book Review by Louis Wasser. “I’m the last of Hollywood’s dinosaurs.” – Jean Negulesco (124) Although, in retrospect, the stars seemed to align during the years of Jean Negulesco’s birth and death (1900-1993) for him to be tagged a Hollywood-Golden-Age director, the Romanian immigrant had little clue what his […]
Laughing at the Land of Oddz: Closure
February 15, 2018
By Elias Savada. There have been plenty of movies that have skewered the sunbaked air of Los Angeles and the strange people who breathe it – Mick Jackson’s L.A. Story and Robert Altman’s The Player remain two of my favorites – but folks, if you find somewhere showing writer-director Alex Goldberg’s Closure following its world […]
The Boy Who Fell To Earth: The Astronaut’s Bodies (Die Körper der Astronauten)
By Elias Savada. Russian-born and German-trained Alisa Berger shows off her experimental and artistic tendencies in The Astronaut’s Bodies, a graduation project for the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Her first feature is a meditative family drama that extends its light story line (also by Berger) into juxtaposed threads […]
Negotiating Entanglement: An Interview with Jason James
February 13, 2018
By Tom Ue. Entanglement, the latest film by director Jason James, follows the story of Ben Layten (Thomas Middleditch) after he discovers that he nearly had an adopted sister: his parents abandoned their plan to adopt a child after learning that they had him. Ben searches for, and begins to […]
Marcel Pagnol’s “Marseille Trilogy”: An Essential Reemerges on Criterion
By Christopher Weedman. Among the most impressive film restorations of 2017 was Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy (1931-36), which I reviewed last March when Janus Films screened it theatrically in select US cities. Those not fortunate enough to live near such splendid art-house and independent film venues as the Film Forum […]
Flicks and Politics: An Interview with Rob Reiner
February 8, 2018
By Ali Moosavi. Rob Reiner is one of the most successful American directors working today. However, it’s difficult to pin him down to any particular genre or style of film making. He has made one of the greatest cult comedies of all time (This Is Spinal Tap, 1984), two of […]
Social Critique, in Truth and Fiction: 2018 Oscar Nominated Live Action and Documentary Shorts
February 8, 2018
By Elias Savada. With less than a month before we find out how many Academy Awards The Shape of Water will actually win, the short list of the shortest films are usually the last entries that most people, even critics, will catch before game night: Sunday, March 4th. Between those 15 […]
Big Dreams and Odd Dwellings: 2018 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
February 7, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. The best short films hook viewers, carry them through the story, and deliver a surprising finish. Animation is best when it is used to depict things that cannot quite happen in real life – especially when animation is used to do this in inventive ways. The […]