By Gary M. Kramer. The title character of A Man Called Ove would probably not see the heartwarming Swedish film, A Man Called Ove, adapted from Fredrik Backman’s national bestseller (2012, English translation in 2013). He is far too cynical, and would call this gentle comedy-drama “mush nonsense.” Still, this […]
A Multicultural Magnificent Seven for Our Times
October 6, 2016
By Kate Hearst. Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven showcases a multiracial cast of personalities who collaborate to defeat a murderous robber baron on the American frontier. The overall cinematic spectacle of teamwork among this star-studded collection of lone gunslingers, led by Denzel Washington, is as deeply satisfying as the 1960 […]
A Fun Swansong: The Last Film Festival
By Christopher Weedman. The Last Film Festival’s comedic glimpse into the behind-the-scenes politics and turmoil that surround film festivals began as a joke between the film’s writer-producer-director Linda Yellen and its late iconic star Dennis Hopper during an encounter at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. When she asked him what […]
The Celluloid Collector World That Dreams are Made Of: A Thousand Cuts by Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Written by two former dealers in this area, A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies (University of Mississippi Press, 2016) offers readers a cinematic magical mystery tour into the now diminishing world of film collectors, a […]
The New World: Exploring the Developing Territory of Terrence Malick
October 4, 2016
By Jeremy Carr. During post-production on The New World (2005), director Terrence Malick said it would be the last time he made a movie with a plot. Given the film’s free-form audio-visual flow and its loose narrative construct, the statement was met with some amusement. Plot though there may be, […]
The Lovers and the Despot: Forced Seduction, North Korean Style
By Johannes Schönherr. The Lovers and the Despot, a 2016 documentary by British directors Robert Cannan and Ross Adam, tackles an especially bizarre episode in Korean history playing out in the late 1970s / the first half of the 1980s. An episode that has been told countless times in magazine […]
“Culture Has No Borders”: Ibrahim Letaief and The Carthage Film Festival
October 2, 2016
By Matthew Fullerton. Conceived in 1966 by legendary Tunisian film critic Tahar Cheriâa (1927-2010) to bring together Arab and African cinema, the Carthage Film Festival (JCC) has always had a reputation for breaking taboos: In its fifty years of existence, it has been a platform for filmmakers to question, confront […]
The 2016 New York Film Festival
October 1, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer. The 54th New York Film Festival showcases more than one hundred features, shorts, documentaries and experimental films September 30 – October 15. Many of the titles are the latest films by some of the biggest names in world cinema—Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Paul Verhoeven, and Ang […]
Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven: Loss of Grace
By Christopher Sharrett. I have always thought that John Sturges’s 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven has suffered too unfavorably in comparison to its source material, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). Kurosawa’s film, like all of his samurai films, was heavily influenced by Ford, Hawks, and Walsh, making him, to my […]
Film Scratches: The Dance of Money and Artists – Vive le Capital (2012)
September 28, 2016
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. At the start of Vive le Capital, Orit Ben-Shitrit’s absorbingly strange examination of capitalism, art, and domination, we see a French […]