By Jeremy Carr. Once you accept and appreciate the superficial contrast between Agnès Varda (a legendary filmmaker, diminutive, inspirationally enthusiastic if rigid by age — she is pushing 90, after all) and JR (tall, lanky, young and mobile, a quintessentially hip modern artist), the rest of Faces Places begins to comfortably […]
It’s All About the (Many) Details – 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
By Elias Savada. I can’t remember the first time I saw Psycho. I was a 10-year-old kid when Alfred Hitchcock’s menacing tale made more than a few people start avoiding motels. (Keep telling yourself: It’s only a motel! It’s only a motel!) The film wasn’t the kind of thriller my suburban […]
Critique with Some Scopophilia: Gestures of Love by Steven Rybin
November 1, 2017
A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. “Anybody got a match?” Who doesn’t remember the first time they heard Lauren Bacall utter these words; the first time they, along with Humphrey Bogart, laid their eyes on her in To Have and Have Not. Did we fall under her spell in the very […]
Blade of the Immortal: Where Jidaigeki and Manga Collide
By Matthew Fullerton. Takashi Miike isn’t one to shy away from pushing the boundaries of existing genres and teasing his audiences while promoting and screening his films. Take his horror masterpiece Audition (1999). Its narrative meanders along with a gentle story of loss, loneliness, and a search for love before […]
The Florida Project: Childhood in Time of War
By Christopher Sharrett. Occasionally, the Hollywood industry produces a film that notes the poverty flowing from the neoliberal order, as a “permanent underclass” becomes no more than journalistic jargon taken for granted with a shrug by those sectors of the public who need to pay attention. I think of Kelly […]
Film Scratches: Pulling Meaning out of the Shots – Incident Reports (2016)
October 27, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Incident Reports, the brilliant feature-length essay film by Mike Hoolboom, has an ingeniously flexible form. It is comprised of short segments, […]
Film Scratches: Prelude (2014)
October 27, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Prelude is a 7 minute film by Simon Welch about a young girl (Mel Z) practicing a Bach prelude on the […]
Northern Lights: The 14th Reykjavík International Film Festival
By Randy Malamud. I didn’t see the Aurora Borealis during my October visit to the Reykjavík International Film Festival, probably because I spent every night at the movies, but I did have some spectacular views of them on screen. “The energy of the planet comes from the north,” says a […]
Amplified Isolation: It Takes from Within
October 25, 2017
By Gary M. Kramer. The wordless pre-credit sequence of It Takes from Within sets the tone for this stark, atmospheric drama: three couples crawl, stand, and lie in a bed on an illuminated patch of grass. Gorgeously filmed in luminous black and white, the sequences does not make much sense, […]
The “Complete Italianization” of the Western: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from Kino Lorber
By Tony Williams. This is the moment when the Italianization of the Western was complete. –Alberto Moravia, quoted by Christopher Frayling As most film departments merge into Media conglomerates and student knowledge of past films diminishes due to increasing time constraints, it is all the more important that the world […]