By Elias Savada. With all the unrest in the Middle East, it seems that one of the few places where Israelis can gather these days for a good laugh would be at the cinema. Yet, despite the best efforts of its cast, Hunting Elephants is a tame comedic excursion into a […]
Stand, Men of the West! The Battle for Middle-earth (and Britain)
By Laura Crossley. “You’ve enjoyed the film, so now what are you going to do about the message? Tolkien didn’t just write The Lord of the Rings for fun, you know. He wrote it to inspire people, to make people understand that – faced with bad government and threats to […]
Radical Film-Making and Digital Paradox: the case of The Fourth Estate
By Elizabeth Mizon and Lee Salter. Digital media technologies are full of paradoxes. On one hand they are said to open up new opportunities, a “democratisation” of media, but on the other they are said to consolidate not just media power, but also the ideological frameworks that constrain critical creative […]
Quick Take: Frederick Wiseman on At Berkeley (2013)
By Paul Risker. 1967 marked the inception of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary filmmaking career (with the controversial asylum expose, Titicut Follies), but fast-forward to the present day and behind him now lies a total of forty-seven diverse films. If there was a singular inspirational moment or spark for this observational career […]
The Trials of Love, Justice, and Prejudice: Tom Hanks and Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia
By Daniel Garrett. In the film Philadelphia (1993), written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Jonathan Demme, the actor Tom Hanks is impressive for being able to incarnate several perspectives in one man – states of health and malady, youth and sudden age, but also the public and private man, […]
On the Trail of Missing Millions in Emerging Europe: What Happened to a Fortune in Slovenian A/V Rights Due to Artists and Producers?
By Noah Charney. Branko Djuric, who goes by the nickname Djuro, is one the biggest film and television stars of the former Yugoslavia. His repertoire includes fistfuls of films, popular TV series, plays and even albums, spanning decades, so he is entirely used to receiving royalty statements and checks each […]
Fast & Furious 7: Balancing Frivolity and Depth
April 12, 2015
By Cleaver Patterson. Occasionally a film comes along which, though what unfolds on-screen is far from erudite, the final result manages the difficult feat of combining heart and spectacle to an equal degree. Fast & Furious 7 – the latest instalment in the worldwide cinematic phenomenon – will likely be […]
She Goes for It: Cortney Palm on Zombeavers (2014)
By Matthew Sorrento. When Patricia Arquette debuted in the hit A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), few could have imagined the major artist she’d become. Granted, she soon shined in vehicles with room for her talent, as an innocent yet subversively sexual ‘50s nurse – the gal who […]
Moved by Faith: Krzysztof Zanussi on Foreign Body (2014)
By Amir Ganjavie and Shadi Javadi. Although Krzysztof Zanussi’s films received less global exposure over the past couple of decades and were not commercially successful, he is one of the most commonly seen Polish directors on the international festival circuit. Zanussi is very productive, having made almost fifty features with an average […]
The BBC’s Israeli Drama Hostages: A Story of ‘Best Laid Plans’
April 6, 2015
By Paul Risker. Permeating contemporary film and television is the sense of an oppression of foreign language drama within storytelling, whose intentional or unintentional objective is the promotion of English as the officially sanctioned language of film and television drama. The words that most aptly describe this enduring threat are […]