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 […]
The 2016 New York Film Festival Shorts Program
September 28, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer. The New York Film Festival offers a range of fascinating short films, in five programs that showcase narrative shorts, international auteurs, genre stories, New York stories, and documentaries. The Narrative program is a mixed bag. The dark comedy Be Good for Rachel has Rachel (writer Rachel Sondag) […]
Random Beauty and Fragility: An Interview with Selma Vilhunen on Little Wing
September 26, 2016
By Tom Ue. Selma Vilhunen earned an Academy Award nomination for her 2012 short film “Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?” In what follows, we discuss her new feature Little Wing (2016), which follows the twelve-year-old Varpu (Linnea Skog) in her search for her father. Varpu’s meeting will […]
Japan’s Modernist Enigma: Woman in the Dunes on Criterion
By Christopher Weedman. The haunting enigmatism and visual beauty of Woman in the Dunes (1964) has not diminished since its premiere over fifty years ago. Shot on a budget of $100,000 over four months in Tottori City, Tottori-ken, this Japanese art-house classic was released during the wave of modernist filmmaking […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Patricia Riggen
By Anna Weinstein. Patricia Riggen has directed five features in the past decade. Her first feature, Under the Same Moon (2007), was a critical and commercial success, telling the story of a mother working illegally in the U.S. in the hopes of providing a better life for her son in […]