By Dean Goldberg. There’s an often quoted line attributed to director Alfred Hitchcock that goes like this: “Drama is life with the boring parts cut out.” Flesh and Blood, a new film that turned heads at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival, bounces Hitch’s statement on its end. Indeed, actor/director Mark […]
Novitiate: Life Entombed
By Christopher Sharrett. I have always been curious about the lives of nuns, mainly because I suffered under their twisted physical and psychological ministrations for eight years of parochial grammar school in the Fifties. The topic of a nun’s origins are dealt with in a not particularly distinguished film entitled […]
Assisting a First-Time Director: Robin Vidgeon on Lensing Hellraiser
November 20, 2017
By David A. Ellis. Robin Vidgeon was born in August 1939 and has worked on numerous films. For many years he worked with the legendary cinematographer Douglas Slocombe as his focus puller. His last two films with Slocombe were Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of […]
Preparing for Office Mayhem: An Interview with Samara Weaving
November 17, 2017
By Tom Ue. Mayhem is the latest film directed by Joe Lynch, and it stars Steven Yeun, Samara Weaving, and Steven Brand. The film follows Derek Cho (Yeun) over a single day as he is unjustly fired from his job at a law firm. The building that they are in is […]
A Bloody (Laugh) Riot: Mayhem
November 17, 2017
By Elias Savada. The tongue-in-check, over-the-top aspect of Mayhem, a looney tune of a film from director Joe Lynch, offers a steroid-infused day in the life of a really toxic office environment. And I do mean toxic, as in a nasty, infectious virus nicknamed ID-7, which first appears, appropriately, as a […]
“Shift to Sincere”: A Gray State
November 16, 2017
By John Duncan Talbird. In January of 2015 screenwriter and aspiring filmmaker David Crowley was found dead along with his wife, Komel, and five-year-old daughter, Raniya, in their Apple Valley, MN suburban home. Crowley had self-funded a promotional video for a proposed film called Gray State, a dystopian vision of America […]
Orson Ascending: The Stranger (1946) from Kino Classics and Othello (1951) from the Criterion Collection
By Tony Williams. Following the release of several new remastered DVDs after the 2015 Orson Welles Centenary and the expected completion of his last unedited feature The Other Side of the Wind sometime in the future, this year sees two more additions continuing Welles’s legacy. Rather than “Orpheus Descending,” it […]
Documenting in Defense of Art: An Interview with Hila Peleg
By Yun-hua Chen. The Israel-born Hila Peleg is a curator and filmmaker based in Berlin. She is the founder and artistic director of the Berlin Documentary Forum, a biennial event (2010, 2012, 2014) which was devoted to the production and presentation of contemporary and historical documentary practices in an interdisciplinary […]
The Paris Opera: A Rhapsodic Story
By Cecilia A. Zoppelletto. The sophisticated style of The Paris Opera, whilst weaving stories of mundane occupations with the artistic highlights of this world, turns the documentary itself into an opera. The story, which follows the classic formula of the backstage picture by taking place in a theatrical setting where […]
Alaskan Neo-Noir: Sweet Virginia
By Elias Savada. As the latest shadowy slant on the malevolent small town subterfuge melodrama – following a few weeks after George Clooney’s Coen Brothers-inspired Suburbicon, which takes the neo-noir thriller sub-genre to totally outlandish levels – Sweet Virginia is a more personal, low-key affair that follows the aftermath of […]