By David A. Ellis. Director Daniel Raim is the talent behind the movie Harold and Lillian – A Hollywood Love Story. The film is about Harold Michelson and his wife Lillian, who between them made a significant contribution to many well-known Hollywood movies. They were married for sixty years. Harold was […]
Truth and Fiction: Werner Herzog’s Salt and Fire and Queen of the Desert
April 14, 2017
By John Duncan Talbird. It’s hard to know why Werner Herzog still makes fiction films. He clearly loves to travel to strange and wonderful places as part of his work, to film these landscapes and interpret them. He has the loose, improv nature of the documentarian and his recent documentaries are […]
Par for the Course: Tommy’s Honour
April 13, 2017
By Elias Savada. Both old school and old-fashioned come together in style and substance in Tommy’s Honour, Jason Connery’s passable historical look at golf. The drab (in a good, yet unexciting way) production design is definitely Scottish mid-19th century, and the acting could be called grand without being exceptional. Think a […]
Hobart Bosworth – Silent Cinema’s Sea Wolf: Behind the Door (1919) from Flicker Alley
By Tony Williams. Ever since seeing that unforgettable still in Kevin Brownlow’s The War, the West, and the Wilderness (1979), the grim-visage of Hobart Bosworth (1867-1943) in Behind the Door (Irvin V. Willat, 1919), wielding a scalpel with the shadow of his victim in the background, has occupied an ineradicable part of […]
Spotlight on the Modern City: An Interview with Pete Travis
By Tom Ue. Pete Travis is an award-winning film and television and director. Before becoming a director, Pete was a social worker. After taking a post-graduate course in filmmaking he bought the rights to Nick Hornby’s Faith and spend £12,000 of his own money to make the film. Faith premiered […]
Dividing Lives: Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva’s Glory
April 11, 2017
By Devapriya Sanyal. At first glance it may seem that Glory, the new Bulgarian film directed by Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva, belongs to Tzanko Petrov (Stefan Denolyubov), the honest but simple linesman who returns the cash he finds on a railway track he services. In the beginning nothing much happens […]
Programming Shorts for Tribeca 2017 – An Interview with Sharon Badal
April 11, 2017
By Gary M. Kramer This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, held April 19-30, features 10 shorts programs curated by the esteemed Sharon Badal (an 11th program, handled entirely by ESPN, is out of festival competition). The programs this year include a strong mix of documentary and narrative shorts from 18 countries. […]
Tough Onscreen and Off: The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones
A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. In The Lives of Robert Ryan (Wesleyen University Press, 2015), Chicago film critic J.R. Jones points out the many contradictions in the actors’ career and life as reflected in the title of the book. The actor did, in fact, lead many lives. Ryan was […]
If Only We Could Live for Today: After the Storm
By Elias Savada. The actual typhoon in After the Storm is more than a physical catastrophe. It’s a powerful metaphor for an acclimatized world of broken families. It takes more than half this modest, sensitive Japanese feature’s nearly two-hour running time for the gusts and driving rain to arrive, wherein […]
“The Road Leads to Nowhere” – Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard Beyond Cinema by Michael Cramer
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Last week, a friend and fellow reviewer Chris Sharrett told me about his experiences at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference that drew immediate parallels, not with the more accomplished zombie films of George A. Romero, but countless others reworking familiar lyrics […]