By Jake Rutkowski. About twenty minutes into The King’s Choice, it hits me: I know absolutely nothing about Norway’s political history. Nor its governmental structure. Nor its involvement in World War II. Nothing. While there are some informational title cards at the start of the film, I found myself bereft of […]
Oneiric Noir: The Chase (1946) from Kino Lorber
By Tony Williams. Based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1944 novel The Black Path of Fear, The Chase (1946) has long required a remastered DVD version though bootleg versions previously available may have added to its reputation as a darker shade of noir appropriately associated with its creative source. It was directed […]
Prison of the Mind: The Big Knife (1955) from Arrow Academy
By Jake Rutkowski. There are few time capsules more compelling to me than works in which Golden Age Hollywood peels back the curtain on its own sordid affairs. What normally proceeds is melodrama in the throes of self-aggrandizement, tempered by winking metatext that points to the absurdity of it all. […]
Dying To Live Another Day: Realive
By Elias Savada. The general belief that there is seemingly civil attitude toward one another in our planet’s clean, sterile looking future reflects the sci-fi genre’s long-standing notion that there is no clutter in our lives down the road. As seen in Realive, an existential look into life after death […]
Early Black Cinema Recovered: Lost Boundaries (1949)
By Louis J. Wasser. In the late 1940s, a man from New Hampshire named Albert Johnston, Jr. wrote a letter to film documentarian Louis de Rochemont. Johnston, in his early 20s, alluded to the book Lost Boundaries written by William L. White about his father, the elder Albert Johnston, a […]
Knowing Our Past: An Interview with Legendary Tunisian Actor Fatma Ben Saidane
October 12, 2017
By Matthew Fullerton. With a career spanning some forty years and upwards of fifty films, plays, and radio and television shows, Fatma Ben Saidane is one of the most recognizable and important performers, not only in Tunisian theatre and cinema, but also in the entire Arab world. She has worked […]
Enjoyable Traces: After The Fox (1966) from Kino Lorber
By Tony Williams. Back in 1965 BBC TV screened a documentary introduced by Dirk Bogarde, The Epic that Never Was, an informative analysis of a 1937 failed film version of I, Claudius that would have been directed by Josef von Sternberg starring Charles Laughton in a role that would later be […]
The Charming “Lithuanian Cary Grant”: Walter Matthau in Hopscotch on Criterion
By Christopher Weedman. Walter Matthau (1920-2000) was among Hollywood’s most charismatic stars of the late 1960s and 1970s. During this fascinating period where New Hollywood favorites such as Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and even Woody Allen were becoming sex symbols despite possessing unconventional looks, Matthau parlayed his “Best […]
A Lumbering Beast: Woodshock, Woodshlock
October 9, 2017
By Elias Savada. The answer to whether smoking kills lies beneath the surface of this abstract but ultimately empty-plotted first feature from sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, better known for having created the designer label Rodarte. The film, apparently inspired by the scenic American backdrop that infuses their fashion line, suffers […]
Noir en Blanc: Vivian Qu on Angels Wear White (TIFF)
October 9, 2017
By Tom Ue. Writer, director, and producer Vivian Qu’s second film Angels Wear White is set in a small seaside town. Two schoolgirls were assaulted in a motel and the one witness, Mia (Wen Qi), is a teenager working on reception. The film follows the stories of Mia and one of […]