By Zhuo-Ning Su. Films are lives imagined, projected, simulated. When the play-pretend is effective and the make-believe works, we can hope to lose ourselves in a staged reality that convincingly reflects our own. Every once in a long while, however, a movie would come along that, for reasons often too […]
Film Scratches: New York Subways as Therapy – Participate in My Relaxed State (2016)
June 21, 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. Halley (Megan Clement) is a young woman in search of healing from an unstated ailment. Participate in My Relaxed State, a […]
Documenting Post-Millennial Teens: All This Panic
By Kate Hearst. With an artful lens, All This Panic captures the awkward and fleeting stage of teenagers on the cusp of young adulthood. Over the course of three years, Brooklyn-based wife and husband art photographers, Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton, follow seven high school girls who attend the La […]
You Can’t Keep Quiet Anymore: Atomic Homefront
June 18, 2017
By Elias Savada. If you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the system works. As a study in government failure and corporate greed, this HBO-supported documentary from director Rebecca Cammisa shows that your trust is grievously and tragically misplaced if you expect the Environmental Protection […]
No Future: Ghost World (Criterion Collection)
By Christopher Sharrett. I should say at the outset that my thoughts about the social-political vision (or failure thereof) of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World are dependent on the fine work of Henry Giroux, whose remarks are available on the Internet (I’d recommend his “Neoliberalism and the Disappearance of the Social […]
Auteur as Raconteur: Director’s Cut by Ted Kotcheff, with Josh Young
June 15, 2017
A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Who would have figured the Canadian director of such diverse films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), North Dallas Forty (1979), and First Blood (1982) would be such an engaging raconteur? But here he is, at age 86, recounting great stories about the making of his films, the people […]
When Tay Garnett Met Frankie and Johnnie: Her Man (1930)
June 14, 2017
by John Andrew Gallagher. Tay Garnett and and writer Howard Higgin spent the months of February and March, 1930 on Catalina Island writing Her Man, sharing a house with Lewis Milestone, who was working on the script of All Quiet on the Western Front with George Cukor, George Abbott, Del […]
Marlon Rides Again!: One Eyed Jacks from Criterion
By Tony Williams. In his 2015 detailed and definitive study The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Paul Seydor lamented the fact that then available copies of the only film Marlon Brando directed were from inferior sources and hoped to see “a proper, responsible […]
From Drawn Till Dusk: Milan Erceg on 24 Hour Comic
By Constantine Frangos. When renowned cartoonist, author, and comics theorist Scott McCloud first suggested the idea of creating a full 24-page comic book within a single day to fellow comics artist Stephen R. Bisette, it was conceived as an exercise to stoke creative agility. More than twenty years later, the […]
Trust and the System: Andrew Cohn on Night School
June 9, 2017
By Matthew Fullerton. Night School, which premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, is the latest documentary from Emmy award-winning filmmaker Andrew Cohn (Medora 2013). It follows the challenges of three adults, Greg, Melissa and Shynika, as they pursue their high school diplomas from an adult learning centre in Indianapolis, […]