By Elias Savada. Don’t be confused by the branding up front on this new live action/motion capture film from Steven Spielberg. “Disney’s The BFG” is just the way the mouse studio puts its mark on its global empire. That world now includes Giant Country, which may or may not be […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Susanna White on Our Kind of Traitor
July 1, 2016
By Anna Weinstein. British director Susanna White began her career in documentaries and in BBC television in the mid-1980s. She directed seven episodes of the BBC series Bleak House (2005) and all four episodes of the Jane Eyre miniseries (2006). Two decades into her career, she got the opportunity to direct […]
F.W. Murnau’s Faust: A Dazzling Achievement in German Silent Cinema
July 1, 2016
By Jeremy Carr. There is the sense while watching the 1926 silent German masterwork Faust that director F.W. Murnau and company are showing off a bit. With a wealth of money at their disposal and a hefty allotment of time (an essentially unlimited budget, finally reaching a reported two million […]
True Accounts of a Classic: Behind the Scenes of Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly by Peter J. Hanley
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This handsome, beautifully illustrated, well-researched book of over 400 pages (from Il Buono Publishing) is another example of the valuable work done by individual talents outsides the institutional confines of an oppressively market-driven publishing industry. Currently available on various Amazon.com links, whether America, the UK or […]
FilmInt on the Underground: Ten Minutes with Johnny Simmons (on The Phenom)
FilmInt on the Underground is a blog dedicated to emerging filmmakers and other talent. By Roy Koriakin. Here goes a ten-minute interview with Johnny Simmons, the lead of a new baseball movie, The Phenom. Ten minutes is a very short amount of time for an interview. He was working on […]
Michael Morris’ Hermeneutics: Visual Music, Expanded Cinema, New Aesthetic
June 29, 2016
By Michael Betancourt. Michael Morris’ expanded cinema performances, Second Hermeneutic (2013) lasting approximately nine minutes, and Third Hermeneutic (2014) lasting approximately eleven minutes, are both produced using a combination of traditional 16mm film projectors and video; Third Hermeneutic also employs digital technology – a laptop computer running a custom Midi-controlled piece […]
Free State of Jones: Fumigating the Magnolia
By Christopher Sharrett. I often show students the opening credits and establishing sequence to David O. Selznick’s garish, appalling 1939 film about the Civil War and the Old South, Gone with the Wind. After the credits, we see a crawl that wistfully mourns a time of cavaliers and gentlewomen, of […]
English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015 by Jonathan Rigby
June 27, 2016
A Book Review by Cleaver Patterson. In the Author’s Note introducing English Gothic – Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015 – the newly updated edition of his comprehensive text on the British film industry’s contribution to horror cinema first published in 2000 – author Jonathan Rigby discusses the effect the popularity of […]
Out of the (Garden) House: Rachel Tunnard on Adult Life Skills
June 27, 2016
By Paul Risker. Adult Life Skills (2016) is filmmaker Rachel Tunnard’s feature debut, a creative expansion of her earlier award winning short film Emotional Fusebox (2014). With an editing background in both shorts and features, Tunnard’s foray into writing and directing has been the recipient of immediate success. While Emotional Fusebox […]
Tunisia at the Movies: An Interview with Programmer Dhia Eddine Felhi
By Matthew Fullerton. Cinema has long been an integral part of the economy and culture of Tunisia: Major Hollywood blockbusters have been filmed in full, or in part, in this small North African country, including Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The English Patient (1996), and since […]