By Cleaver Patterson. Emily Booth has a wealth of experience both in front of and behind the camera. As a result, the British horror actress and face of television’s popular Horror Channel is better placed than most to comment on the current state of the horror genre, and its place […]
BFI London Film Festival 2015: Festival Programme Launch
By Cleaver Patterson. In the February 1984 issue of films magazine Derek Malcom, the newly appointed Director of the London Film Festival, introduced himself with a bold statement, claiming that “the LFF is known all over the world as one of the best-organised and best presented in the business”. Now, over […]
FILM4 FrightFest 2015 Interview: Adam Mason on Hangman
By Paul Risker. Every filmmaker has a story and English filmmaker Adam Mason’s began with a resilience in an hostile landscape. Looking back on the early part of his career during which time he tried to forge a path into filmmaking he explained: “I ended up making music videos as […]
Film Scratches: Janie Geiser on the Life of Objects
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. An Interview by David Finkelstein. Janie Geiser has been making objects come alive in performance works since 1981 and in films since 1989. She has […]
2015 DC Shorts Film Festival: September 10-20, 2015
By Elias Savada. I love shorts. Bermudas. Boxers. Short’s Brewing of Michigan. (Yes, there is a beer tie-in. Read on.) But for this column, I’m talking film shorts. And I guess most of them aren’t even shot on film anymore. Video, digital, etc. But they’re all great for little emotional […]
Who Needs Enemies? — Getting Acquainted with Eddie Coyle and His Friends
By Jeremy Carr. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Eddie Coyle sure could use a friend. Surrounded by many, known by even more, with a family and with former and current partners in crime, Eddie is nevertheless alone. He is a tragically solitary figure whose perhaps naive earnestness leaves […]
Coixet in the Dark: A Conversation on Another Me
By Paul Risker. The Catalonian filmmaker Isabel Coixet has moved beyond her native tongue to work in various languages that crisscross lingual borders to create both single and bilingual narratives. But for Coixet these dialects are simply part of a larger language that combines them all. As she explains: “I […]
Ben Kingsley and Company on Learning to Drive
By Jude Warne. “The ferryman takes you from one bank of the river in his little craft, his boat, to the other bank of the river,” says Sir Ben Kingsley on this variety of the taxi-passenger experience. “You get off his boat and feel that your molecules have somehow been […]
Subversive Mysteries: François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend
By Elias Savada. There’s a tendency toward sexual subversion and sly mystery in any François Ozon film. Naughty fun in the comic farce 8 Women (2002). A year later, the voyeuristic Swimming Pool‘s American tagline was “On the Surface, All Is Calm.” More recently came the unsettling relationship between a […]
A Conchord Flies Solo: People Places Things
By John Duncan Talbird. New Zealand has given the world actors Sam Neil and Russell Crowe and directors Jane Campion and Peter Jackson. But above all others, I would have to express a soft spot for New Zealander Jemaine Clement, one half of the folk pop comedy duo, Flight of […]
