By Jeremy Carr. This story of hidden obsessions and malicious passions, climaxing in a scene of wild delirium, is like a bipolar soap opera and tragicomedy rolled into one subtly piercing satire of masculinity, authority, and persecution.” A Good Friday mass is underway. Somber music plays while altar boys have […]
Syncretized Equality: Judge Priest, Early American Music, and Singing on the Front Porch
By Richmond B. Adams. John Ford’s Will Rogers vehicle has yet to receive the full credit for the complexities of its cultural commentary…. the present examination will argue that Judge Priest undermines the world it supposedly affirms.” From the middle-1920s through his death in 1946, my maternal grandfather, the Reverend […]
Big Day for a Small Finnish Town: Cinéma Laika
By Jonathan Monovich. Vidak/Felce’s film serves as a meaningful exploration of the role that cinema and movie theaters play in our lives.” Driving through the wooded roads of Karkkila, a small Finnish town, Emmanuelle Felce tells Veljko Vidak “I could live here. You can be in deep nature, beautiful nature. […]
Listening to Freedom: Tommaso Santambrogio on Oceans are the Real Continents
By M. Sellers Johnson. Rather than provoking a kind of response from nothing, we hoped to shape the characters out of the reality of their lives and reality experiences. As a director, I feel that it is more important to listen than to talk.” Oceans Are The Real Continents is […]
Restauranteur, Dance Instructor, Hitman: Kazuo Mori’s A Certain Killer and A Killer’s Key (Arrow Video)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Light on their feet but not rushed, fun but not goofy, these films deliver just about everything you’d want from the hitman genre….” In 1967, Japanese director Kazuo Mori released back-to-back actioners starring Raizô Ichikawa as the archetypal hitman. Coldblooded, principled, calm under pressure—and often seen […]
It’s a Mad World, After All: Marco Ferreri: The Films of an Italian Provocateur
A Book Review by William Blick. In the true spirit of monomaniacal, egomaniacal, and nomadic film auteurs everywhere, Curti brings a vivaciousness to the text that immersed this reader into the brilliant and grotesquely absurdist world of Ferreri.” In film scholar Roberto Curti’s new book Marco Ferreri: The Films of […]
A Lebanese Artist Challenged: Eric McGinty’s Stockade
By Ken Hall. Ahlam’s mission acquires a Hitchcockian aspect as this law-abiding artist in the US becomes trapped in a situation which she does not understand, with mysterious people posing a threat to her safety.” This subtly presented independent mystery-drama relates the economic and emotional challenges facing Lebanese artist Ahlam […]
Considering the Last Breath: An Interview with Costa-Gavras
By Ali Moosavi. It’s an important personal lesson to myself to learn to prepare myself to die with dignity. The others cannot help you and I think you have to know the truth.” —Costa-Gavras I first became aware of Costa-Gavras, and quickly became a fan, in the Seventies after watching […]
Eve and Her Siblings: Edward Burns’ Millers in Marriage
By Jonathan Monovich. Burns intends on making the Millers artists and is keen to understand that partnerships, like artists, do not always have the spark.” Writer/Director/Actor Edward Burns has long strived to live by Robert Bresson’s words “make visible what, without you, might perhaps never be seen.”1 His first film, […]
Blurred Boundaries, Inside and Outside of Marriage: Alan Zhang on This Woman
By Yun-hua Chen. During the pandemic, Li Haihai and I discovered a shared fascination with portraying a female figure navigating life inside and outside of marriage.” Beibei—a daughter, a wife, a mother—finds herself at a crossroads when she loses her steady job and faces the uncertainties of the pandemic. In […]