By John Duncan Talbird. Director Daniel Augusto and screenwriter Carolina Kotscho’s biopic of the Brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho, Paulo Coelho’s Best Story, opens with the young author-to-be (Ravel Andrade) attempting suicide by gas range. Before he succumbs, he hears a rock song — a song we return to later in […]
Accidental Love: An Illuminating Failure
August 6, 2015
By Paul Risker. One of the intriguing occurrences that forms part of the spectatorial experience is the point when you will silently interrogate the source of your enjoyment. Perhaps it is that the characters, the pictures and the music have touched your sensibilities on an emotional level. But sometimes there […]
The Way, Way Back: An Appreciation
By Christopher Sharrett. Some months ago I saw The Way, Way Back (2013) and was taken by it enough to buy the DVD. It is a small film, yet ambitious, serious in its insights, and uncommon in its understanding of and sympathy for young people, its gentle portrayal of a […]
Shirley: Visions of Reality
By Robert Buckeye. She is from Seattle. She is from Dubuque, Dayton, Dover. She is going to San Francisco, Chicago, New York. To Paris. She will be an actress, writer, artist. She will be herself. At one point in Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013, written and directed by Gustav Deutsch), […]
Sam’s Words Only: A Fuller Life
August 3, 2015
By Elias Savada. Samantha Fuller watched her journalist-turned-novelist-then-screenwriter, director and occasional actor dad grow old and angry with the Hollywood studio system. Fuller fille (born in 1975 to his second wife, actress Christa Lang) appeared in small roles in two of Sam Fuller’s later efforts, including White Dog, a racism-themed […]
Resonance in the Present: Saul Dibb on Suite Française
August 1, 2015
By Paul Risker. There is a touch of irony to British writer and director Saul Dibb’s career, whose most recent recent feature Suite Française (2015) is an adaptation of Auschwitz victim Irène Némirovsky’s two unfinished novellas. The most poignant moment in the whole film is a daughter’s (Denise Epstein-Dauplé) words […]
“There is No ‘Independent’ Cinema in Iran”: A Conversation with Producer Mostafa Azizi
July 31, 2015
By Hooman Razavi. Since February 2015, producer Mostafa Azizi has been detained in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison (when visiting an ailing parent) on a bogus charge of endangering national security and insulting the supreme leader. Azizi is sentenced to 8 years and is now waiting for an appeal, supposedly to […]
All About Asking Questions: Andrew Bujalski on Results
July 30, 2015
By Paul Risker. A film’s journey is comprised of multiple steps. The next step or chapter for writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s fifth feature Results (2015), following its warm reception at SXSW and Sundance, is one of continuation, as the transfer of ownership from filmmaker to audience continues. Known for his comedies: […]
Sunset Edge: Children at Twilight
July 29, 2015
By Christopher Sharrett. While watching Daniel Peddle’s very interesting Sunset Edge (2015), I couldn’t help but think of F.R. Leavis’s reaction to George Eliot’s final masterpiece Daniel Deronda (1876). He argued (very wrong-headedly) that the two “halves” of the novel didn’t cohere, and that the “Zionist half” should be cut away, leaving […]
Britain On Film – Britain’s History and the BFI Film Archive
July 29, 2015
By Cleaver Patterson. Britain as a whole has a history as unique as that of the four regions which constitute it—England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. With this in mind it is hardly surprising that much of its story should have been captured on film. Since the emergence of the […]