By N. Buket Cengiz. No matter how much face Turkey loses on the international stage particularly with its friction with European countries, Istanbul Film Festival is a phenomenon in Turkey that has always been and will always be a symbol of international communication and collaboration. The 36th edition held on […]
Tribeca Talks: Alejandro González Iñárritu and Marina Abramović
May 20, 2017
By Gary M. Kramer. This year, at the Tribeca Film Festival, one of the Tribeca Talks programs featured Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu being interviewed by Yugoslavia-born artist, Marina Abramović. “She is the queen,” says Iñárritu, acknowledging Abramović grandly as they arrived on stage. “I’m super-nervous.” The artist opened the […]
Be There Demons? A Dark Song Looks for the Answer
May 19, 2017
By Elias Savada. Grief changes you. It can drive you to do dark and drastic things outside your normal routine. Such aberrations are the creepy core of Irish director Liam Gavin’s moody chamber piece, A Dark Song. This excursion into the realm of magick was influenced by the life and strange […]
The Splendid “Zone”: Tarkovsky’s Stalker Restoration by Mosfilm
May 18, 2017
By Anthony Uzarowski. Whenever a film gets digitally restored and reissued after a considerable amount of time passes from its initial release, the first question that comes to mind is: is it still relevant? This is especially true of works by renowned filmmakers, auteurs whose artistic voices defined their own time […]
The Young Girls of Rochefort: Nearly Utopia
By Christopher Sharrett. I somehow conflate in my mind’s eye images of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) with images of my experiences of the late Sixties. This seems odd, since these masterworks by Jacques Demy, although fully-accomplished […]
International Films abound at the 27th Annual Washington Jewish Film Festival
By Elias Savada. Twenty-seven years on, the Washington Jewish Film Festival remains a vibrant part of the Nation’s Capital scene. As the area’s largest Jewish cultural event, the 12-day program of documentary and narrative movies, running from May 17-28, will feature 63 features and 18 short films representing 25 countries. […]
The Purification of Rupture: A Conversation with Steven Shainberg
May 16, 2017
By John Duncan Talbird. In 2002, director Steven Shainberg won a special jury prize at the Sundance film festival for Secretary, his second feature film, an adaptation (with screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson) of Mary Gaitskill’s eponymous and iconic short story. Starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Shainberg’s film transformed Gaitskill’s stripped-down […]
More Stupid Human Space Tricks – Alien: Covenant
May 15, 2017
By Elias Savada. Thirty-eight years ago this month, the world experienced a horror like no other. Ridley Scott’s Alien intensely attacked worldwide audiences. No one wanted to swim into the ionosphere. Our species has never been the same. We’ve now survived three sequels and one prequel (2012’s Prometheus) as the man […]
Eldritch Ecstasy!: Everything You Need to Know about Caltiki The Immortal Monster
By Tony Williams. With one exception, this new release does live up to the second part of the above caption. Long revered by devotees of horror, science fiction, and its post-war Italian exponents this notable film of a disputed canonical tradition has not been generally available in a good copy […]
Amit Masurkar on Newton: A Tribeca Film Festival Interview
May 11, 2017
By Gary M. Kramer. Newton is co-writer/director Amit Masurkar’s nifty film about title character (a charismatic Rajkummar Rao), an election official who is sent to the jungle in central India to monitor a particular voting district. He is warned about Maoist guerrillas operating in the area, as well as explosives. […]