By Elias Savada. A semi-creepy opening sequence for director-writer Benjamin Meyer’s micro-budget feature directorial debut Fools had me wondering whether stalking can be an acceptable dating platform. Two people exchange glances and touch hands on a passenger pole aboard a Chicago El train. He moves his grasp higher. Her hand follows. […]
The 2016 DC Independent Film Festival
March 9, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer The DC Independent Film Festival, billed as “the oldest independent film festival in our nation’s capital,” started screening dozens of features, documentaries, shorts and animated films March 4-13. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s program. Train Station (March 10, 8:15pm) is an impressive […]
Secrets Haunt Our Past: The Automatic Hate
March 7, 2016
By Elias Savada. Listen, I have three vices. Movies. Craft beer. And genealogy. Shortly after Justin Lerner’s second feature, The Automatic Hate, begins, there’s an uncomfortable meeting between socially awkward Alexis Green (Adelaide Clemens), an amateur stalker, and Davis Green (Joseph Cross), a bearded chef for a casually refined Italian café […]
The Sentinel Excavated
By Christopher Sharrett. I use the word “excavated” in my title not because the 1977 horror film The Sentinel , directed by Michael Winner, is lost to film history, but because it has been buried – with some justification – by legitimate criticism worthy of respect. I will argue in […]
The Camera as Our Imagination: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
March 4, 2016
By Paul Risker. Alain Resnais and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) – two names forever locked in an embrace; the latter a defining and resounding heartbeat within the filmmaker’s cinema. Alongside Last Year in Marienbed (1961), Resnais was the creator of cinematic or narrative labyrinths that liberated filmic storytelling, and furthered attention […]
Conventional Calamity: The Wave
March 2, 2016
By Elias Savada. Disaster movies are a dime a dozen here in the United States. Catastrophes (usually) are Hollywood’s bread-and-butter…and your buttered popcorn. Now, head across the pond to Norway and you’ll — until now, never — have seen such large-scale destruction in a film, where the industry is known for […]
D.C. Independent Film Festival Celebrates Its 18th Anniversary
By Elias Savada. Over the years, lots of film festivals have been flitting about the Washington, DC, metro area, hoping to steer filmgoers’ attention away from the latest Marvel Comics blockbuster or foreign arthouse flick. Filmfest DC is 30 years old. The Spooky Movie International Film Festival (which I help program) […]
Film Scratches: Bali Descends Into Modern Capitalism in Rice for Sale (2013)
March 1, 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. In Rice for Sale, filmmakers Brendan and Jeremy Smyth have tried to use documentary footage which they shot in Bali to […]
Small Town Texas Lite: A Country Called Home
February 29, 2016
By Elias Savada. Doused with a familiar, filial melancholy, A Country Called Home is a bittersweet tale of a 25-year-old woman coming to grips with the ghosts in her estranged family’s closet. Music video helmer Anna Axster directed, co-wrote (with Jim Beggarly) and was a producer on her low budget, slow-cooking […]
Keeping it Bleak, and Feminist: Gilles Paquet-Brenner on Dark Places
February 27, 2016
By Paul Risker. Neither is the final version of a film nor the path of the filmmaker a collection of exclusive deliberate creative choices. Writer/director Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s breakthrough came with Sarah’s Key (2010), a story that follows one woman’s journey into the past that has subsequently been echoed by Dark Places […]