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 […]
Entertaining Mr. Klein: Eclipse Series 9 – The Delirious Fictions of William Klein
By Tony Williams. Although this special Criterion three film DVD set has been available since 2008, it is only recently that I have discovered the work of William Klein. I first came across the name associated with the French anti-Vietnam War film Mr. Freedom which at the time of co-editing […]
The Social Misfits of Kikujiro
September 19, 2016
By Yun-hua Chen. Made by Takeshi Kitano in 1999 and having entered the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, Kikujiro was subsequently remade into a Tamil-Indian film Nandala (2010) by Myshkin. After more than one and a half decades, it still seems timeless both in terms of aesthetics and […]
At Your Door: Ashley McKenzie on Her Debut Werewolf
By Tom Ue. Ashley McKenzie is an emerging writer-director from Cape Breton Island, Canada. Her 2015 short “4 Quarters” screened at TIFF, VIFF, Stockholm IFF, Festival du nouveau cinema, and won Best Atlantic Short at the Atlantic Film Festival. With her previous work, “Stray” (2013), “When You Sleep” (2012), and […]
Film Scratches: Negotiations of the Bicameral Mind – Ward of the Feral Horses (2015)
September 13, 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. Orit Ben-Shitrit’s absorbingly strange and powerful 20 minute film Ward of the Feral Horses begins with a young man (Maxwell Cosmo […]
Film Scratches: Wacky Lyricism – Grandma Opera (2008)
September 13, 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. Grandma Opera is a charming and kooky 6 minute mini video opera by director Kenneth Hughes and composer Mark Hart. Hart’s […]
What Shall Remain Unseen?: Hidden Hitchcock by D. A. Miller
A Book Review by Tony Williams. A DVD player now lets everyone scrutinize Hitchcock’s esoteric images, but the desire to engage the game of hide-and-seek latent in them – a game just barely visible during theatrical projection – is born with the films themselves. (Miller, 167, n.14) I suspect that […]