By Sotiris Petridis. The horror film usually incorporates social critiques within its filmic texts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) has been described as a commentary on the post-Vietnam era, while the slasher film subgenre of the 1980s critiques this conservative period when the AIDS crisis was one of the main concerns […]
FilmInt on the Underground: Art and Sacrifice in Artworkers
FilmInt on the Underground is a blog dedicated to emerging filmmakers. By April L. Smith. Andrzej Jachimczyck’s documentary Artworkers is less than twenty minutes long, yet in that short span of time, the film manages to cover so much history through subtle layering and narration. Artworkers is an exploration of […]
The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind: Titles that Don’t Lie (and a Jack Nicholson who Doesn’t Flip Out! – Yet)
November 18, 2015
By Jude Warne. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966), recently released as a joint Blu-ray set via The Criterion Collection, are two Monte Hellman Westerns that are as nondescript as their titles suggest them to be. And, much like the title of Hellman’s road picture, the Criterion-released […]
Where Nobody Looks Into the Camera: A Conversation with Frederick Wiseman
By John Duncan Talbird. Frederick Wiseman is one of the most important and influential American documentary filmmakers, living or dead. In a career that spans nearly a half-century, he has directed forty documentaries, exploring all manner of human institutions from the mental institution to the welfare office, from a high […]
The Weird World of Aimy in a Cage
By Elias Savada. It’s not just that the always quirky Crispin Glover is featured in Aimy in a Cage that makes it weird. Of course, for the actor who gained everyone’s attention as George McFly in Back to the Future (1985) and was the eponymous sociopathic rat wrangler in the […]
From Dust to Glory: Speed Sisters
November 13, 2015
By Elias Savada. I’m not sure NASCAR saw this coming. I sure didn’t. Speed Sisters, which has been racing about the documentary film circuit since it’s world premiere at the Doha Film Institute’s Ajyal Youth Film Festival last December (the film bears a 2015 copyright notice, so I suspect it wasn’t […]
Gut(s) and Glory: Lucha Mexico
By Elias Savada. The smog hangs lightly over the partly cloudy skies of Mexico City as this story begins. A guitar with a Latin beat grabs the soundtrack. Trumpets blare. People walk the streets munching on tacos. The camera catches a sidewalk display with garish magazine covers adorned with body […]
On Leaning into Emotions: An Interview with Catherine Hardwicke
By Anna Weinstein. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke has directed six features since her award-winning debut Thirteen in 2003. Her most recent film, Miss You Already, is now in theaters, starring Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore and written by British screenwriter and actress Morwenna Banks. It’s unlikely anyone can escape this film without […]
A Long, Strange Trip: Sam Klemke’s Time Machine
November 9, 2015
By Elias Savada. Australian director-writer Matthew Bate (responsible for the fly-on-the-wall 2011 documentary Shut Up Little Man: An Audio Misadventure) took an interest in his latest film’s central character after watching a video by him on YouTube that year. More on that later. Sam Klemke’s Time Machine, a work compiled […]
The Visual Desolation of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario
November 9, 2015
By Kyle Huffman. “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out of the frame.” This seemingly direct estimation of the art form by legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese defines movies as utilizing first and foremost one sense: the visual. The portrait design of the silver screen traditionally […]