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 […]
All That Shapes a Star – Grace Kelly: Hollywood Dream Girl by Jay Jorgensen and Manoah Bowman
A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. In the 1950s female movie stars were expected to be more than human. For a price of a cinema ticket one could sit in the dark, gazing at the world’s most beautiful people. In some cases, viewers might even expect to witness the divine, for some […]
The Form and Function of a Cult Film: Deep Red by Alexia Kannas
A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. Alexia Kannas’ Deep Red (Columbia University Press, 2017), her contribution to the Wallflower Press Cultographies series, in which she takes a deep dive into the making, reception, and legacy of Dario Argento’s 1975 giallo masterpiece, is an ideal meeting of author, subject, and publishing […]
Bromance, Romanian Style: Andrei Cretulescu on Charleston
February 5, 2018
By Martin Kudláč. The Romanian writer-director-producer Andrei Cretulescu rolled out his first feature-length offering Charleston at the biggest Swiss showcase in Locarno. The film continued to tread the festival circuit and made a stop-over in Warsaw where Film International caught up with the filmmaker. Diverging from the aesthetics of the New […]
Disorder in the Court: The Insult
February 2, 2018
By Elias Savada. When 46-year-old automobile mechanic Tony George Hanna (a piercing-eyed Adel Karam) is first seen in The Insult, he’s at an open air rally supporting the country’s right wing, anti-refugee political faction. At home, a photo of his hero hovers over the crib of his soon-to-be-born daughter, despite pleas […]
Where Does the Shredding End? – Ripping England: Postwar British Satire from Ealing to the Goons by Roger Rawlings
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Ripping England is the latest of two recent studies by American academics devoted to aspects of British Cinema. Although the day is long gone when certain snotty English academics could remark that Americans should not write about British cinema gaining the justified response, “Then […]
On National Consciousness – Hungarian Film 1929-1947: National Identity, Anti-Semitism, and Popular Cinema by Gabor Gergely
January 31, 2018
A Book Review by Robert Buckeye. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabainares (1963), a soldier at a cinema for the first time sees a woman on the screen, leaves his seat to meet her, and walks into the screen. What he sees he believes to be real, but he does not understand […]
White Micro-aggression Against Black Film: Awards and Why They Matter
January 30, 2018
By André Seewood. Every weekend numerous websites inform us of the short term box office grosses of various films like Star Wars: The Last Jedi which itself has raked in a whopping 591 million dollars in short-term office gross in this country alone. This notion of box office profit as the […]