A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Joan Hawkins’ recent multi-authored book, Downtown Film & TV Culture 1975-2001 (Intellect), is a heteroglossic text bringing together multiple genres – historical documents, interviews, conversations, focused analysis, and even traditional academic articles – to paint a chaotically vivid picture of the New York “downtown” […]
Mirroring a Genius – Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
By Elias Savada. OK, kids, who among you doesn’t know who Norman Lear is? The few of you who raised your hands, shame on you. (I tested this question on a friend half my age, and he thought I was talking about the guy who dropped a lot of LSD. […]
From Film International to Film Restoration
August 5, 2016
When interviewing Lassie Lou Ahern – one of the last two silent film stars still around – for a piece in Film International (13.1), Jeff Crouse learned of her desire to have her 1927 film, Little Mickey Grogan, restored. As an activist in several aspects of film culture, Crouse began rescuing the film, in which she starred alongside […]
Unearthing That Cold Day in the Park
August 3, 2016
By Chris Neilan. Here’s something to brighten the day of any self-respecting cinephile: the unearthing of a forgotten film by a bona fide American master. And not just any master, but Robert Altman. Few American directors are better loved than Altman, the own-tune-following iconoclast who defied structuring paradigms, paid attention to his […]
Beyond the Dream Life: Fantastic Planet on Criterion
By Jessica Baxter. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I first stumbled upon René Laloux’s surreal animated French language sci-fi film, Fantastic Planet (1973). I assume I was old enough to read subtitles, but I’m not 100% sure because the visuals are engaging and unusual enough to […]
An Absent Father Watching: Daniel Burman on The Tenth Man
August 2, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer. In The Tenth Man, Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman returns to his favorite theme of absent fathers/put-upon sons, and to his favorite location, Once, a Jewish quarter in Buenos Aires. The film’s title comes from the Jewish tradition of having a minyan (ten male adults in the […]
A Woody Allen Fluff: Café Society
By Elias Savada. Problems are afoot in Woodyland. The jokes are there, albeit fleetingly and the best ones deal with gallows humor. The romantic comedy-drama script seems regurgitated from some of director-writer Woody Allen’s earlier works, and his alter-ego, Jesse Eisenberg, is back (after 2012’s To Rome With Love) for […]
Art Film Fest 2016: Footprints of Lynch
By Robert Buckeye. Film festivals not only screen films we should see but also give us a reading of the field. At Art Film Fest this year, its first in Kosice after 23 years in Trencianske Teplice, the footprint of David Lynch was inescapable. In films from Canada, the Czech […]
Film Scratches: Modernist Myths – Orphine (2014)
July 25, 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. Orphine is an intricate and complex 12-minute short on mythic themes by Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian. The video is based […]
Playing with Horror and Drama in Journey to the Shore
July 23, 2016
By Chris Neilan. Directors who blend genre elements with an arthouse sensibility are rarely short of fans or plaudits. Take new darling of the American independent scene Jeremy Saulnier, whose career-making sophomore feature Blue Ruin (2013) applied a realist monkey-wrench to the nuts and bolts of the revenge thriller. Or […]