By Christopher Sharrett. There are certainly films more perceptive about class and race than Beatriz at Dinner, a film I put off seeing since its basic idea (a lower-class woman stuck in an upper-class dinner) seemed too familiar. The film is indeed based on an old concept most of us would recognize, […]
Nothing’s Changed: Lost in America (Criterion Collection)
By Jessica Baxter. It’s been over 30 years since Albert Brooks unleashed his on-point satire about the mental unraveling of dissatisfied yuppies in Regan-era America. And while Easy Rider (1969) the film that inspires them, is even further in the rearview today than it was in 1985, the sentiments of ignorance, delusion, […]
Film Scratches: Tutorials for the Apocalypse – La Fuga (2014)
July 24, 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. La Fuga is a suite of many linked short videos by Mexico-based artist Adrián Regnier Chávez. The videos are modular in […]
Film Scratches: Dark Comedy of Dangerous Rhetoric – Stenography (2016)
July 24, 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. Stenography, Lee Murray’s fabulously complex, sophisticated and enthralling hour-long epic comedy about political turmoil in Munich 1923, begins modestly with a […]
From Chile to High Concept: Marko Zaror on Savage Dog
July 24, 2017
By Martin Kudláč. Marko Zaror, Chilean-born martial artist known from the films of Robert Rodriguez, stars as the nemesis, Rastingac, to Scott Adkins’s hero Martin Tilman in Jesse V. Johnson’s latest action film, Savage Dog. Tilman, a former champion boxer, fights for wealthy criminals to bet on while he is imprisoned somewhere […]
Film Scratches: Meditations on the Ordinary – The Short Trilogy of Peace (2016)
July 23, 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. Martin Sagadin in a Slovenian filmmaker living in Canterbury, New Zealand. His Short Trilogy of Peace consists of three shorts, which […]
L’argent: Bresson Ends
By Christopher Sharrett. The terms “ascetic” and “austere” are too-common adjectives applied to the films of Robert Bresson. It is reasonable to apply them, but for me “constricted,” “severe,” and “repressed” serve better. Many of Bresson’s films, especially in his late phase, are utterly drained of eroticism; critics have debated […]
A Stumble in the Woods: First Kill
By Elias Savada. Bruce Willis still tracks 243 on the IMDB.com STARmeter scale (I’m at 1,325,678). All kind of entertainment folk are part of the ratings, and Willis has been moving downward lately after decades in the top 100. His gradual tumble down the rankings rabbit hole began with the […]
Diversity and Unity – Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media, Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb
A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb’s Global Cinema Cities (Columbia UP, 2016) poses as its task to explore “the evolving, mutually constitutive relations between moving image media and the global city, [but to do] so at a time when profound questions are being asked about […]
Out of the Dark(room) and Into the Light – The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
July 19, 2017
By Elias Savada. There is an elegant, simple beauty in documentarian Errol Morris’s affectionate portrait of his friend, soft-spoken, 80-year-old Elsa Dorfman, in his new film. In a career that spanned the majority of her adult life, Dorfman has found the fun in photography, and it’s probably best to spell it […]