By Martin Kudláč. The emerging Georgian filmmaker Ana Urushadze unveiled her first feature-length directing effort Scary Mother, a Georgian-Estonian co-production made at the prestigious Swiss showcase in Locarno. While introducing her bleak psychological drama about emancipation onto the festival circuit, she nabbed the Swatch First Feature Award at the Concorso Cineasti […]
A Stilted, Flat Wonder Wheel
December 8, 2017
By Elias Savada. Woody Allen has gone dumpster diving. His new film, Wonder Wheel, is anything but wondrous. In fact, it stinks. The aging auteur may open his movie with a cloud-specked blue sky framing the aquamarine beach umbrellas and masses of New Yawkers absorbing the sun across every inch of […]
Money, Censorship, and Films of the Chinese Independent Cinema: An Interview with Han Dong
By Martin Kudláč. The inaugural edition of the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival introduced several emerging filmmakers from the Chinese independent cinema. China produces over 800 films annually and lacks a vital platform to curate new independent production for potential domestic and international releases. Pingyao was founded […]
Melville at 100: Le samouraï from Criterion
By Tony Williams. Initially released in 2005, this new edition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s outstanding film has only one new feature to complement those that appeared earlier. They include the 2005 interviews with Rui Nogueira, editor of the classic interview book Melville on Melville (1971), and Ginette Vincendeau, author of the […]
Early Programming in the Midwest: Saving Brinton
By Jeremy Owen. Documentaries about cinema are today so numerous that they are close to a genre in their own right and, with a very definite cinema-centric subject matter Saving Brinton puts itself firmly into that canon. Co-directed by Iowa based film-makers Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne along with fellow […]
Double Vision: The Breadwinner
November 30, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. The power and purpose of storytelling is essential to The Breadwinner, the newly released animated adaptation of Deborah Ellis’ 2000 young-adult novel of the same name, directed by Nora Twomey and scripted by Anita Doron. For Kabul father Nurullah (voiced by Ali Badshah), stories are a way to […]
“And ‘Nothingwood’ in Afghanistan”: An Interview with Sonia Kronlund
By Yun-hua Chen. Sonia Kronlund came to filmmaking by way of philosophy, criticism, and broadcasting. She studied philosophy at Sorbonne in Paris before developing a career as a French radio reporter. For 15 years she reported from Afghanistan about the war, as well as from Japan and Iran, while contributing reviews to Cahiers […]
From Novel to Transformation – The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics”: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture, Edited by Rosemary Roberts and Li Li
November 28, 2017
A Book Review by Tony Williams. On the surface, most of this edited collection of essays from Hong Kong University Press (2017) appears to have little to do with media save for the last section. But today, Film (and by implication Media) Studies has long passed the time when it had to […]
In Defiance of Hollywood – Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxpoitation, 1977-1986 by Keith Corson
A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. The film director’s traditional conflict between making an artistic statement and making a film that earns money is especially challenging if the director is black. Like any, these filmmakers have to cover significant costs and work within a budget. And because film is […]
Daniel Radcliffe Survives: Dana Lustig on Jungle
November 26, 2017
By Tom Ue. In Bolivia, 1981, Yossi Ghinsberg (played by Daniel Radcliffe), Kevin (Alex Russell), and Marcus (Joel Jackson) meet the mysterious (and apparently more experienced) traveler Karl (Thomas Kretschmann), who becomes their guide into the uncharted Amazon. Some weeks into the trip, the group separated into two. Following a rafting […]