By Elias Savada. When I last visited Denis Villeneuve it was when I reviewed one of the best films of last year. Arrival was that perfect storm of a film from a masterful storyteller and technician…but I’ve since changed my mind about it. It is actually the best film of […]
Harry Dean Stanton: Finally, Sadly, Career-Topping in Lucky
By Elias Savada. Harry Dean Stanton was older than dirt when he died earlier this month. In human years, that was 91. I’m pretty sure if you placed him side by side with a mound of desert fill, they’d look the same. With an acting career that spanned 60 years […]
A Haneke Masterpiece: The Piano Teacher (Criterion Collection)
By Christopher Sharrett. I count Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) among his supreme masterpieces, along with Code Unknown (2000), Cache (2005), and The White Ribbon (2009). His “glaciation trilogy” (so named for its examination of the death of affect in the West, and the emotional freezing-over and fading of […]
New York, International: NYFF Shorts 2017
October 2, 2017
By Gary M. Kramer. The shorts programs at the 55th New York Film Festival are divided into three narrative sections: Narrative, Genre Stories, New York Stories, and there are some real gems among the fiction entries. There is also a Documentary program, but the non-fiction shorts were not previewed. The […]
Kissing Candice: An Interview with Aoife McArdle
September 28, 2017
By Tom Ue. Director Aoife McArdle discusses the making of Kissing Candice, a film that follows the titular character (Ann Skelly), a 17-year-old, who aspires to escape the boredom of her town and who finds solace in her imagination. Dreams and realities collide when she meets Jacob (Ryan Lincoln), about whom […]
Film Scratches: Untangling Political Violence – Anál-isis Callejero (Street Anal-ysis, 2012)
September 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. In Anál-isis Callejero (Street Anal-ysis), Chilean filmmaker Pablo Molina Guerrero’s nine minute meditation on political violence, we see a complex montage […]
Film Scratches: Blowing Out the Candles – Hurricane (2017)
September 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. 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 […]