By Gary M. Kramer. The American Film Institute’s annual European Union Film Showcase screened December 1-20 at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. This year’s program, the festival’s 28th, opened with Spanish filmmaker Fernando León de Aranoa’s comedy-drama A Perfect Day, set in the Balkans, and closed with Radu […]
Awakening the Legacy from Here?: Star Wars: the Force Awakens
By Paul Risker. Stories as in life have no true beginning, middle or end. Rather they are just a series of events running together like a never-ending piece of string that creates the linear structure of time. It is perhaps within the individual chapters that a beginning, a middle and […]
The Real Bad Santas: Monstrous St. Nicks from Around the Globe
By Sotiris Petridis. When we hear “Christmas films” we usually think of family-themed movies, comedies or even rom-coms, but the last thing that comes in mind is horror. Many horror films are based on holiday themes to attract audience members that are cranky about this jolly season. Black Christmas (1974 and […]
Expression/Supression: Gabe Polsky on Red Army
By Paul Risker. If the world is a stage in its own right then one of the enduring and timeless dramas is that of the division between East and West. It is a division that extends from political and communal ideas of otherness to employ sport, art and culture as […]
An Antidote for Loneliness: Dreams Rewired
December 16, 2015
By Jude Warne. “What is the good of all this progress? By overcoming distance we overcome difference.” True – it seems likely that the only route to world peace is the route that points straight ahead – or if not straight, then at least ahead. Because it is most definitely not […]
From Shakespeare to Superheroes: An Interview with Jordan Galland
December 14, 2015
By Tom Ue. Jordan Galland has directed commercials, music videos and three feature films: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (2010), Alter Egos (2012), and Ava’s Possessions (2016). As a recording artist, he has released over a dozen albums of his own songs since 1998 and contributed music to films and […]
Spike Gets His Groove Back: Chi-Raq
December 12, 2015
By Elias Savada. I was ready to give up on Spike Lee after suffering through Red Hook Summer, his 2012 scattershot meditation on the director’s beloved Brooklyn. Lo and behold, the joint man is back in fine iambic pentameter form with the latest adaptation of the ancient Greek dramedy Lysistrata by […]
Simple, Beautiful Perfection in Brooklyn
December 12, 2015
By Elias Savada. It’s interesting that novelist-screenwriter-producer Nick Hornby and director John Crowley previously have been best known in the world of cinema for their boyish works. Hornby wrote the charming novel About a Boy (1998), which became an award-winning comedy film in 2002 that introduced us to rising star […]
A Master and a Masterpiece: Hitchcock/Truffaut
December 11, 2015
By Robert K. Lightning. The historic 1962 interview of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (ironically tape recorded and photographed, but apparently unfilmed) that led to the publication of Truffaut’s landmark Hitchcock in 1966, is examined in Kent Jones’s fine new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut. That the interview was a singular moment in […]
“A Process of Thinking”: Radu Jude on Aferim!
December 10, 2015
By Paul Risker. Ask the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude how he views the place of his most recent feature AFERIM! within his body of work, and his response will be a modest one. “Well you know, when you say this important expression ‘body of work’, it makes me feel somehow like […]