By Amir Ganjavie. Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart could be defined as a metaphorical representation of the status of romance in the age of consumerism. By focusing on three different time periods – 1999, 2014, and 2025 – the movie describes how emotions and feelings evolve over time and what […]
The Real Harry Lime: A Restoration of The Third Man (1949)
June 22, 2015
By John Duncan Talbird. What matters in that kind of role is not how many lines you have, but how few. What counts is how much the other characters talk about you. Such a star vehicle really is a vehicle. All you have to do is ride. —from This Is […]
Beauty from Chaos: Filmmakers Kenny Gage and Devon Downs on Anarchy Parlor (2015)
June 21, 2015
By Paul Risker. Anarchy Parlor (2015) is the directorial debut for Kenny Gage and Devon Downs, who along with co-directing this Lithuanian-set horror, together co-wrote the picture. Whether Anarchy Parlor will follow in the footsteps of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and hurt the Lithuanian tourist trade, for what would certainly […]
The Wolfpack (2015): Too Close to Home
June 20, 2015
By Elias Savada. Here’s a thought. Flip through the opening lines of an imagined screenplay for The Wolfpack…. It’s dusk. The Empire State Building centers the landscape, but a chain link boundary obscures the view. It’s a prison metaphor, and the film’s principals, the brothers of this stranger-than-fiction tale, liken […]
Content and Technique in Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns
June 19, 2015
By James Knight. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), Jean-Paul Belmundo turns to man at a party and says, “you seem to be alone.” The man is of course Samuel Fuller, the writer and director of Forty Guns (1957). Via a translator Belmundo then asks Fuller what exactly cinema is, […]
The Trials and Tribulations of The Three Hikers (2015)
June 19, 2015
By Elias Savada. World premiering as part of the Washington Post Film Strand at this year’s AFI DOCS is The Three Hikers, the freshman feature from rookie director Natalie Avital, an actress known or unknown for appearances in dozens of short subjects, supporting roles in the slow-burn horror entry Shallow […]
Onward from the Editing Suite: A Conversation with Andrew Hulme
June 17, 2015
By Paul Risker. The magical touch of film editing, seen and yet often unacknowledged, is similar to putting a jigsaw puzzle together to create a narrative and aesthetic flow between the multitude of shots and scenes. Emerging from the confined and hidden space of the editing room, Snow in Paradise […]
The “Stagecoach Ride” of Seeds of Time: An Interview with Director Sandy McLeod
June 16, 2015
By Jude Warne. Sandy McLeod is more than familiar with the art of documentary filmmaking. After all, she has worked with the great Jonathan Demme on the 1984 Talking Heads classic Stop Making Sense and the 1987 television documentary Haiti: Dreams of Democracy. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her 2003 […]
Highlights from the 20th San Francisco Silent Film Festival
June 16, 2015
By Michael T. O’Toole. So, 20 years on and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) is still proving their commercial knack for showcasing movies that cover the timeline, genre gaps and stylistic stamps—not to mention innovative presentations and musical accompaniment that breathed new momentum into previous released material and […]
True Tête-à-Tête: Best of Enemies (2015)
June 15, 2015
By Elias Savada. Oscar-winning (2013’s Twenty Feet From Stardom) documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, a Grammy Award winning writer, author, and filmmaker, collaborated back in 2007 on the film Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, which later (2013) became a 463-page book by Gordon. A new version […]