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. In Hurricane, Carla Forte’s powerful 5 and a half minute dance film in black and white, all of the footage is […]
An Actor’s Life – Which One was David? by David Frankham with Jim Hollifield
September 26, 2017
A Book Review by Tony Williams. The title of this review is not accidental. It is deliberately meant to evoke the title of that 1978 book by Charlton Heston, The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976, but with the definite article changed to emphasize the fact that many actors, not all of […]
New York Plays Itself: Brian Tochterman’s The Dying City
A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In Thom Anderson’s documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), the history and culture of L.A. is narrated over film clips from other movies. For nearly three hours, this captivating documentary shows how Los Angeles, when it hasn’t “played itself” in the history of […]
Always Fearless: An Interview with Karen Allen on Year by the Sea
By Tom Ue. Actress and director Karen Allen may be best known for her performance as the fearless heroine Marion Ravenwood in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a role that she reprised in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); but she has a […]
Life on Hold: Mike Leigh’s Meantime (Criterion Collection)
September 22, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Based solely on his latest string of features – Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year (2010), Mr. Turner (2014) – one might reasonably assume all Mike Leigh films are mostly comical snippets of cockney quirkiness and bubbly English pleasantry. It doesn’t take much to see this hasn’t always been the […]
Culture, Style, Voice, Motion: The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien by Christopher Lupke
A Book Review by Yun-hua Chen. Christopher Lupke’s The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion (Cambria, 2016) is a well-informed book straddling between the disciplines of Chinese Studies and Film Studies and is highly relevant to film buffs, sinophiles, film researchers, and students. By contextualising Hou […]
All That’s Lost: Rebecca from the Criterion Collection
By Tony Williams. Criterion initially offered Rebecca (1940) on a 2-disc DVD edition in 2001 but following loss of copyright a few years later it became an expensive collector’s item, according to my colleague Chris Weedman. Now they have reissued this version in a new format retaining some of the […]
Love Kills: Sid & Nancy from the Criterion Collection
September 18, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox’s 1986 biopic about raucous Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and his equally rowdy girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb), begins in the aftermath of days, weeks, months, and years spent under a range of influences. Pasty white and dazed, Sid sits limply […]
Stephen King’s IT: Unneeded Horrors
By Christopher Sharrett. I have never much admired the horror fiction of Stephen King, which I’ve called the “hoagie sandwich” approach to the genre, with numerous conventions, images, and devices of horror packed into each novel. Salem’s Lot has the Terrible House with its monstrous history, the serial killer/pedophile, the […]
Adapting to Brevity: Steven McCarthy on We Forgot to Break Up
September 16, 2017
By Tom Ue. We Forgot to Break Up is having its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Chandler Levak and written by Steven McCarthy and Levack, the 15-minute short film follows Evan Strocker (Jesse Todd) as he returns to see the band that he has managed following […]